After writing about bad boys, success, and discipline yesterday, you might ask, “What about Tiger Woods? Why was he pilloried? He is full of discipline. Why didn’t society accept of him something many successful athletes do?” I’m no expert on public relations, but I see two main issues. First, the lesser issue. He doesn’t have a bad boy reputation. His is clean cut and respectful, or looks that way to[…] Keep reading →

America loves and hates bad boys. The media vilify and attack small transgressions. Take Howard Dean. He wasn’t even a bad boy and the media destroyed him after he expressed too much joy and he went from first place to no chance. Yet others who break more stringent rules become icons—in fact, some of our most highly regarded and lauded. Why the difference? Why did Howard Dean go down while[…] Keep reading →

Articles like “Can cities kick ads? Inside the global movement to ban urban billboards” remind me of North Korea, where I saw pictures of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il in most rooms of every building I entered. I wondered, “how does it affect someone’s life to see those pictures every day, everywhere?” Then I realized people there weren’t comparing their environments to ones they didn’t know about. The images probably[…] Keep reading →

People see fitness as something you have to work hard for, doing painful things or spending long hours at the gym, avoiding eating things they like and having to eat things they don’t. It’s been the opposite for me. From my perspective, anyone with those beliefs doesn’t know what they’re talking about. They are confusing satisfying craving with enjoyment, sweating with misery, pleasure with good, and avoiding with depriving. People[…] Keep reading →

Academia has some serious problems. I give a lot of talks to graduate students on what they can do after graduate school, though the following applies to undergraduates too. Many of them are worried about finding jobs. I grab their attention every time with this question: When I was getting my PhD in physics, I thought the only fields I could go into were academia to become a professor, industry[…] Keep reading →

Yesterday I saw yet another of countless articles showing how the U.S. government’s strategy on drugs promotes drug use, crime, government spending that decreases quality of life, etc. You’ve read the article in many formats before. This one’s headline was “Federal Drug Sentencing Laws Bring High Cost, Low Return: Penalty increases enacted in 1980s and 1990s have not reduced drug use or recidivism.” Sound familiar? You probably responded, “Yeah, in[…] Keep reading →

“I’m offended by what you say!” “I’m outraged” People say things like this all the time. People who say things like that write a lot of opinion pieces in the media. I think they’re trying to communicate: “You did something wrong and I have the right to change you.” That’s not what they’re saying, despite their intent. They’re telling you their emotional state. That’s all. To the extent people prefer[…] Keep reading →

Two quotes misunderstand and undervalue people, I contend: “You should get in touch with your masculine side.” “You should get in touch with your feminine side.” People say the first to women mainly, sometimes men, to imply they should learn to act more like mainstream views of men, like learning to fix things around the house, not sweating small things, and enjoying things like pizza and beer. People say the[…] Keep reading →

The college course catalog fascinated me—hundreds of courses in dozens of subjects from amazing teachers. I wanted to take them all! Choosing four or five course from them was wonderful torture. Choosing which to take wasn’t nearly as hard as choosing which not to. I used to think, “I’ll take these two courses … which will set me up for this major … which will set me up for this[…] Keep reading →