Noted

My piece on the science of happiness (read it here) was selected one of the year's notable essays by the editors of The Best American Essays 2010.

Needs Salt

There’s nothing like seeing a really confident book reviewer bite into a really lousy book. Here’s Dwight Garner, who used to edit my work at the New York Times Book Review, weighing in on Ferran, Colman Andrews’ fawning biography of the avant-garde chef Ferran Adria: “Reading Ferran is like being waterboarded with truffle oil.”

Save It For Later

I have been staring at a half-dollar-sized hole in a screen in one of our side-porch windows. This hole has been there since at least last April, when I first resolved to mend it. I still intend to get to the repair one of these days. I think I can have it done by Thanksgiving.

But I had other things to do today, like reading James Surowiecki’s essay on procrastination in the New Yorker. Surowiecki’s piece is a review of The Thief of Time, a collection of academic essays on procrastination. It turns out that all the while I’ve been trying to ignore my torn window screen, I’ve been doing more than just slacking. I’ve been, Surowiecki writes, “engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time.”

Suddenly I don’t feel so bad about the window screen.

Surowiecki cites some famous procrastinators, including Civil War general George McLellan, of whom one colleague said, “There is an immobility here that exceeds all that any man can conceive of. It requires the lever of Archimedes to move this inert mass.” And he mentions some notable solutions to the problem of procrastination. Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.

He also quotes academics like the social scientist Jon Elster, who explains what he calls “the planning fallacy,” which refers to people underestimating the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.”

That’s a pretty fair description of me trying to paint my deck.

I especially like the existential take of philosopher Mark Kingwell: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.” Think he does screen repairs?

Talking with David Brooks

Last week, I interviewed New York Times columnist David Brooks in advance of a lecture he's giving at leafy Elmhurst College on October 1. The Q and A--which focuses on religion and Brooks' intellectual hero (and Barack Obama's), the mid-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr--is here .

Here's Brooks on church-shopping:

I remember during one of the Democratic primaries, I think two elections ago, every single candidate had switched denominations at one point. I think Wes Clark did it twice. Howard Dean did it because his church didn’t support a bike trail that he was supporting. Everyone was moving. That’s part of where we are. But I think the downside is consumer religion, where it’s all pretty thin and people are competing to fill the pews with whatever works in the market.

And here he is on religious literacy in the U.S.:

I’d say it’s pretty awful, but I’ve been places where it’s worse. When my oldest son was born in Belgium and we named him Joshua, I remember the doctor at the hospital assumed we were big U2 fans because of the Joshua Tree album. On the other hand, I’d met a business executive who had a son at Williams College. He was taking an art history course and they were studying the Renaissance and he noticed there were a lot of pictures of mothers with male children. He was appalled because they never showed a mother with a girl. It didn’t occur to him that these were all Madonnas and that child was a specific child. So there’s a lot of illiteracy out there.

I didn't get to ask him any questions about Sarah Palin, Rahm Emanuel, Mitch McConnell or Mark Shields. But I was absolutely relentless on the topic of epistemological modesty.

Gordon Wood, Office Decorator

This video from Book TV about Brown University historian Gordon Wood’s (three!) work spaces is a little like HGTV for the overeducated. Wood shows us how he organizes his home library (“Helter-skelter” is one category) and demonstrates how to rationalize effectively when your department boots you out of your office because it doesn’t have room for emeriti. (“There are some advantages,” he says of his alternate digs in the bowels of the university library. “There are no phones.”)

My favorite moment comes around 5:39 when Wood shows us the box of 5x8 note cards that became The Radicalism of the American Revolution. You can almost hear the gasps of thousands of junior American Studies faculty.

Next week: Gary Wills hems his drapes.

Quick Studies

Quick Studies, my new blog about life at leafy Elmhurst College, is online. Check it out here.

Human Joke Machine

The Chicago Sun-Times leads this morning with a story about a Northwestern AI researcher working on “machine-generated humor” and defending his work from critics like John McCain who don’t like federal funding for “joke machines.” Sadly, no mention is made of the original Human Joke Machine, a programming breakthrough familiar since at least the early 1960s to fans of the Dick Van Dyke Show. Its efforts were often crudely ineffective. Asked to produce a joke about horses, the HJM came up with this: If everyone owned a horse, this country would be a lot more stabilized.