I really enjoyed this New York Times profile on Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton and expert in workplace dynamics. In addition to Grant’s unbelievable productivity (he’s Wharton’s youngest tenured professor), what’s most fascinating about him is his interest in one of my favorite topics, gifts:

Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of social-science research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders.

His research is simplified into when he looks at his work: “My responsibility is to be open.” That sounds like as good as goal as any.

I really enjoyed this piece from The New York Times on Kickstarter. I’m in awe of what Kickstarter has been able to do and have been proud to back some very exciting projects. What I really liked about the piece is how it looks at the service through the lens of one of my favorite topics, gifts:

In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber examines our history of debt and money, concluding, in part, that humans do not naturally tend toward impersonal, reciprocal exchange. Instead, exchange usually develops in cultures first as a part of a larger social and cultural ritual. One of the most compelling cultures Graeber profiles is the Tiv of West Africa, who have very particular rules about exchange. For starters, they believe that bringing an economic transaction to full completion is essentially immoral, or at least frowned upon, because it implies that one party doesn’t want anything to do with the other in the future. If a Tiv man or woman gives you a gift, you are supposed to respond with another gift of slightly greater or lesser value. The outstanding debt between the two of you is a signal that your relationship is going to continue. To respond with a gift of equal value would be to say implicitly that you wish to even things out and draw your relationship to a close.

I love this idea that the gift as a connector must always uneven as a way to show this relationship is not over. The debt creates a space to give back, to keep building upon the exchange, to signify that this relationship is not over.

Kon Leong, of ZL Technologies, asks some interesting (and great) interview questions when looking for candidates who are creative, ambitious, and curious:

But then I’d ask, “Outside the headlines, what were some of the most interesting things you’ve noted in the last couple of weeks, and tell me why, and what did you do about it?” That would reflect what you think is interesting, and that tells me a fair bit. If you can cite many disparate topics, that’s a step in the right direction. The point is, we’re trying to find the right fit. In a fast-changing environment, you need to learn more and more and more. There’s so much to learn, and you can’t be taught all the permutations and combinations of the answers, so you have to learn on your own. And to learn on your own, you need curiosity.

And then:

I’ll ask: How willingly do you accept stuff, and how willing are you to question things? How creative are you in finding your own answers? For example, everyone knows in school that you cannot divide by zero. Why? I try to find if they’ve actually questioned things like that at any time. The point is, we’re usually handicapped by our own borders, and we will not think beyond them. I think there’s one rule of thumb in creativity: when you’re brainstorming, you have to suspend disbelief. That’s a key ingredient. There’s time enough to challenge it and poke holes, but not at the time of generation.

How much do you question? How wide is your curiosity? Creativity is subversive and finding the type of leaders who encourage this is hard to do. When you find them, don’t let them go.

Robin Sloan, reflecting on the late Jim Naughton:

Something amazing happened when you came into Jim Naughton’s orbit. From what felt like the first moment of encounter, he was on your side. And not passively; fiercely. He was suddenly your cheerleader, your press secretary, the newly-elected president of your fan club. He was your champion—but why? How? You were nobody. Fresh out of college. You hadn’t accomplished anything. I mean, seriously: not a damn thing.

It was like a physics experiment: Jim’s support was an effect without a cause. It was the prime mover.

It was the most remarkable thing.

Can you imagine meeting someone like this? Maybe you already have. Maybe you know someone that upon first meeting, you sense that connection, you know they are on your side and will do what they can to help you. You feel that grace. Once you feel it, you can’t help but want to pass it on— to be a cheerleader for someone else—to encourage, to help, to get them closer to who they are going to be.

It’s practically 2013 and now seems as good a time as ever to extend my allegiance to those around me. I’m here to serve, to cheer on, to extend that grace.

The New York Times had a great profile on Jerry Seinfeld last week (but you probably already knew that). The piece focused on his post-sitcom life, most notably his obsession with doing stand-up. The whole piece is fascinating but really excited me was the look into his creative process and his approach to crafting a joke:

Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

When he can’t tinker, he grows anxious. “If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”

James Estrin, writing on the New York Times photography blog Lens, on the proliferation of photo sharing:

A photograph is no longer predominantly a way of keeping a treasured family memory or even of learning about places or people that we would otherwise not encounter. It is now mainly a chintzy currency in a social interaction and a way of gazing even further into one’s navel.

He goes on to question what this means for photography as a profession, an art, and a form of journalism:

As far as I can see — admittedly from ground level — there are two possible effects on “serious” photography.

1. The flowering of photographers leads to millions of people who are thinking more visually and whom we may be able to entice to become an audience for documentary and photojournalistic images.

2. We are bombarded with so much visual stimuli via the Web and social media that it becomes almost impossible to rise above the flood of images. And if everyone likes everything, no one photograph is better than another.

I have no idea which of these situations might happen. Or if there will be a combination of these effects.

Perhaps more than anything else, social media has brought photography to a higher focus. We take more photos than ever before because of how easy it is to share them. We’ve figured out the sharing part, the question now is—and this goes for more than photography—how do we sift through it all to find the extraordinary?

A few weeks ago Errol Morris asked a question on The New York Times blog, stating he was conducting a survey to determine if people were optimists or pessimists. Turns out the quiz was a cover for a larger experiment he was conducting: do typefaces affect peoples feelings, or more specifically, do certain fonts convey a feeling of truthfulness over others. To do this, a script ran that served the question to the viewer with a different typeface each time, including Times, Georgia, Helvetica, Baskerville, Comic Sans, Trebuchet, and Computer Modern. The result? Baskerville overwhelming conveyed a sense of belief:

Is there a font that promotes, engenders a belief that a sentence is true? Or at least nudges us in that direction? And indeed there is.

It is Baskerville.

I’m fully behind the notion that typefaces affect how people perceive information but I’m not sure one face can represent “truth.” A lot of the tools used by graphic designers – color, scale, shapes, typefaces – affect how a viewer perceives information but the reasons why are largely unknown. Why is blue more calming? Why is a triangle seen as powerful but upside down seen as unstable? Michael Beirut weighs in:

Once upon a time, regular people didn’t even know the names of typefaces. Then, with the invention of the personal computer, people started learning. They had their opinions and they had their favorites. But until now, type was a still matter of taste. Going forward, if someone wants to tell the truth, he or she will know exactly what typeface to use. Of course, the truth is the truth no matter what typeface it’s in. How long before people realize that Baskerville is even more useful if you want to lie?

“The truth is the truth no matter what typeface it’s in.”

From an article he wrote for The New York Times in 1951:

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

The New York Times Magazine has an excellent profile on Robert Caro, a 76 year old writer who’s been writing a biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson for almost 40 years and just released the fourth book in what was originally supposed to be a three-book series (and Johnson has only now president).

At this rate, it’s taking Caro longer to write the books than it took Johnson to actually live them. Why does it take so long? Part of it is because Caro keeps discovering new details, new rabbit holes to jump down. The more he digs the more he finds. The other reason is an intense care in what he writes:

It’s not writing that takes Caro so long but, rather, rewriting. In college he was such a quick and facile writer, and so speedy a typist, that one of his teachers, the critic R. P. Blackmur, once told him that he would never achieve anything until he learned to “stop thinking with his fingers,” and Caro actually tries to slow himself down these days. He doesn’t start typing — on an old Smith Corona Electra 210, not a computer — until he has finished four or five handwritten drafts. And then he rewrites the typescript. When I visited him one day in early December, he was correcting the page proofs of “The Passage of Power” the way Proust used to correct proofs: scratching out, writing in between the lines, pasting in additional sheets of inserts.

His editor, the 80 year old Robert Gottlieb adds:

What makes him such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.

I admire Caro’s unending passion and attention to detail and love the concept of essentially dedicating an entire life to one massive work. That type of work doesn’t happen much anymore so we are even more in awe when we see someone committing themselves to that one thing.

(Semi-related: The New Yorker had an excerpt from Caro’s latest book in last week’s issue covering the Kennedy assassination and LBJ assuming the presidency that I loved and they also opened up the archives of every Caro piece they’ve published. I’m looking forward to digging through them.)

The New York Times has a great profile on George Lucas and his desire to return to more personal “art-house” films and retire from the commercial films he is known for. I’ve been thinking about this separation between commercial work and personal work lately, after reading this interview with Nick Knight where he says there is no difference in the work he does for himself and the work he does for clients. This piece on Lucas seems to suggest the same thing:

But you wonder if this view — the commercial versus the personal, the blockbuster versus the experimental art film — is as reductive as the 1970s model. In fact, Lucas has always made personal films, just not in the traditional sense. The very first time Lucas showed “Star Wars” to friends, with World War II movie dogfights standing in for the unfinished effects, Spielberg is reported to have said, “That movie is going to make $100 million, and I’ll tell you why — it has a marvelous innocence and naїveté in it, which is George, and people will love it.”

We inject ourselves into all the work we produce, whether it’s for ourselves or for someone else. The line between commercial and personal isn’t as definite as it sometimes seems.

A great piece from The New York Times on technology’s influence on education and it’s effect on distraction and the inability to concentrate. One principle is trying to find a balance in how technology can be used in schools:

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it.

“I am trying to take back their attention from their BlackBerrys and video games,” he says. “To a degree, I’m using technology to do it.”

The articles also shares a story of a high school junior interested in filmmaking. His parents worry about the amount of time he spends in front of a computer but also realize the internet and technology are the ways he discovered his passion.

[The Student] taught himself to use sophisticated editing software in part by watching tutorials on YouTube. He does not leave his chair for more than two hours, sipping Pepsi, his face often inches from the screen, as he perfects the clip from the cemetery. The image of the crying woman was shot separately from the image of the kneeling man, and he is trying to fuse them.

“I’m spending two hours to get a few seconds just right,” he says.

This is my life. On one end, I wonder if I spend too much time in front of my computer but on the other end, I have to credit it with helping me discover my passion and career choice. I’ve spent many late nights coding websites or kerning typography or editing photos. Hours go by without realizing it. Time moves differently when you are doing what you are passionate about.