Beck's "Saint Dude" performed by Studio 360's Kurt Andersen and WNYC friends

Beck’s new album isn’t what you’d expect. There’s no CD, no .mp3s, and — despite recent trends — no vinyl. So how’s it being released? Sheet music. As the Studio 360 team was getting ready for the interview, they had an idea: What if they put together a band to play some of the sheet music?

Studio 360 followed through on that idea and, with the help of a few dozen friends, proudly presents The Three-Six-Ohs with Beck’s “Saint Dude.” Watch out for WNYC personalities like Morning Edition’s Soterios Johnson, Soundcheck’s John Schaefer, On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone, WQXR’s Terrance McKnight, and Spinning on Air’s David Garland.  Studio 360’s own Reverend John DeLore and several musically-inclined staff members from New York Public Radio also appear.

Oh, and there’s a special cameo too. Is that Beck, or Kurt “Glockrockinbeats” Andersen, and full disclosure, my husband? You’ll have to watch the whole video for the big reveal.

One Question for Jane Pauley

Jane Pauley was the co-host, with Tom Brokaw and later Bryant Gumbal, of NBC's The Today Show from 1976 to 1989. She went on to host Real Life with Jane Pauley and to serve as the deputy anchor for NBC Nightly News.   In 2004,  the year she hosted her syndicated talk show, The Jane Pauley  Show, that she went public with her struggles with bipolar disorder. Your Life Calling: Reimagining The Rest Of Your Lifeis her newest book.  

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Jane:  Put professional risk-taking in context.  I never expected to have the career I had.  Today Show at 25?  There's a story there. Also when I left 13 years later.   And 13 years after that - when I left DATELINE.   That event was more unambiguously voluntary so TV Guide called me "the poster child for Second Acts"  and Barbara Walters called to ask (as many did) 'why walk away from a prime time show?"

My answer was that I simply felt there was more for me, but I wouldn't know what it was until the TV camera got out of the way and  I said I understood that 'more' would likely mean 'less'. The irony was that all the attention I got about leaving made me more valuable to NBC - so I was quietly offered a daytime show.  This was definitely more not less.  And there was the TV camera again!

But it was a different kind of TV than I'd ever done.  A live audience. Women (mostly).  A conversation. I was intrigued. But scared, too. I'd always worked with a partner if not an ensemble.  This would be just me.

I was dithering over this decision even while DATELINE was preparing a special  'Jane Pauley Signs Off.'   Michael J Fox was my final DATELINE interview.   I asked him a long question about how even with Parkinson's he still did so much- a new book, a TV pilot, a 4th child and raised $17 Million for Parkinson's research - in just the last year!

"If it was me"  I said, "I'd be relaxing, conserving my energy."

His response:  "And what would you be conserving your energy for?" It resonated so powerfully.  And I think that was the precise moment I decided to say "yes."

Going up against Oprah, I warned my kids that this was a long-shot, but that I defined 'success' as having the courage to try

Remember the year Oprah gave everyone in her studio audience a new car?   That was the week my show debuted.  Within weeks it was obvious it was not going to be a success under any but the above-stated terms.

The show was canceled after one season.  It was the hardest year of my professional life.  And the best. I'm proud of the shows we did (one critique:  it was too much like NPR). But we had fun, too.

I have a poster from The Jane Pauley Show prominently displayed in my home office.  My psyche seems not to know it was a failure.  That younger woman in the picture inspires me, because she had the courage to say 'yes'.

Reading Now

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less.   Social theorist at Swarthmore College, Barry Schwartz, makes a compelling argument against the mushrooming of choice in our lives.  "We assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction.  But beware of choice overload:  it can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures."  Here are a few of my favorite insights about our working lives:

" According to a survey conducted by Yankelovich Partners, a majority of people want more control over the details of their lives, but a majority of people also want to simplify their lives.  There you have it – the paradox of our times."

"After people choose a career path, new choices face them.  The telecommunications revolution has created enormous flexibility about when and where many people can work.  …And this means that whether or not we work has become a matter of hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute choice.  And whom do we work for?  Here, too, it seems that every day we face a choice.  The average American thirty-two-year-old has already worked for nine different companies.  In an article a few years ago about the increasingly peripatetic American work force, U.S. News and World Report estimated that 17 million Americans would voluntarily leave their jobs in 1999 to take other employment."

"It means that the questions “Where should I work?” and “What kind of work should I do?” are never resolved.  Nothing is ever settled.  The antennae for new and better opportunities are always active.  People can never relax and enjoy what they have already achieved.

"Existence, at least human existence, is defined by the choices people make."

"The process of goal-setting and decision making begins with the question:  'What do I want?'  On the surface, this looks as if it should be easy to answer.  The welter of information out there in the world notwithstanding, 'What do I want' is address largely through internal dialogue.  But knowing what we want means, in essence, being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no simple task. "

Plan C: From Trial Lawyer To Sound Engineer.

At the height of the recession, Studio 360 interviewed scores of people transitioning from one career to another. When Mark Solomon lost his job as a trial lawyer, he decided to create a new career for himself as a sound engineer and designer.  Listen below as he describes his journey to self-reliance, starting with his "Aha!" moment about the sound of the movie WALL-E.

Listen here.

What the Brain Draws from: Art and Neuroscience

Interesting post by Elizabeth Landau at CNN about the intersection of art and science.

"Pablo Picasso once said, "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies."

The illusion of clouds reflecting on water

If we didn't buy in to the "lie" of art, there would obviously be no galleries or exhibitions, no art history textbooks or curators; there would not have been cave paintings or Egyptian statues or Picasso himself. Yet, we seem to agree as a species that it's possible to recognize familiar things in art and that art can be pleasing.

To explain why, look no further than the brain.

The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren't actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.

And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.

What we recognize in art

It goes without saying that most paintings and drawings are, from an objective standpoint, two-dimensional. Yet our minds know

[to keep reading]

Reading Now

Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes. I read William Bridges book years ago when I was in a period of professional reinvention after leaving the corporate world.  In rereading it as research for my next book, I was gratified to discover that it remained as lucid and relevant today as it was when first published over a quarter century ago.  For anyone in the midst of change, and who among us is not, it is an essential primer.  Here are a few excerpts: "Why is letting go so difficult?"

"For some people, these times of change and renewal always seem to involve new relationships, but for others they involve new places or projects.  For still others, it is some new state of mind that appears first, a new feeling or self-image or goal.  Sometimes the beginning results from careful and conscious effort, but for most people important new beginnings have a mysterious and sometimes accidental quality to them.  That is interesting because most of us think we ought to 'take charge' of our lives and 'plan carefully' when we're trying to start again after an ending.  As we shall see later, most of us do that prematurely, for our most important beginnings take place in the darkness outside our awareness."

"The most important fact is not that there are one or three or four or six identifiable periods of crisis in a lifetime; rather, adulthood unfolds its promise in an alternating rhythm of expansion and contraction, change and stability.  In human life as in the rest of nature, change accumulates slowly and almost invisibly until it is made manifest in the sudden form of fledging out or thawing or leaf-fall."

"Sometimes the transition seems to rise up from inside -- a wave of boredom directed at things they used to find interesting or a mistrust of things they used to believe in wholeheartedly; at other times, the transition is precipitated by eternal changes -- either in their personal lives or in the organizations where they work.  Either way, people usually try to put things back the way they used to be.  If the transition is significant, however, that isn't likely to work."

"The task is to find the connection between the change in your work or career and the underlying developmental rhythm of your life."

"One of the difficulties of being in transition in the modern world is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence.  For us, 'emptiness' represents only the absence of something.  So when what's missing is something as important as relatedness and purpose and reality, we try to find ways of replacing these missing elements as quickly as possible."

"Not in his goals but in his transitions man is great. Ralph Waldo Emerson."

Can Thoughts Make You Older?

What words would you associate with being old? I asked a few people recently, and here are just some of the words they used:  fuddy-duddy, not fresh, decrepit, sad, wrinkly, tired, stiff, brittle, unhappy, invisible, obsolete, diminished, fat, fragile, cranky, and marginalized. Wise and experienced were the two positive words that came up, but only after I pushed to see if there might be anything good about getting older. What's wrong with this picture?

According to a report published in the Bottom Line Health Newsletter, by Becca Levy, Ph.D. from the Yale School of Public Health, it is not an idle question, and how you answer it is clearly linked to your health.

In a variety of different kinds of tests, Yale researchers studied what effect perceptual issues about aging might have on health.

First, they asked a group of septuagenarians what words they used to describe an old person. According to Levy's article, they discovered that "those who had stereotypes like ‘feeble' and ‘senile' had significantly more hearing loss than those who had positive associations with age such as ‘wise' and ‘active.'"

In a different study, the researchers followed the recovery patterns of recent heart attack patients and found that those who thought about aging in a more positive way recovered more quickly and successfully.

In an activity as simple as walking, the Yale team's research revealed that even when playing with stereotypes on an extremely subtle level by subliminally flashing words like "alert" or "mature" to one group and "senile" or "decrepit" to another resulted in the participants in the positive group subsequently walking faster and with better balance.

Levy believes these negative stereotypes of aging are so deeply entrenched in our culture that we are oblivious to them. And rejecting them is not a PC thing - it's a selfish means to living better.

Levy believes that "becoming aware of their presence in everyday life is a first step toward questioning their validity." She suggests that keeping a journal to become more sensitized to positive images and embodiments of aging could have significant health benefits.

Here are some further suggestions:

1. Become aware when you automatically default into a negative stereotype about getting old.

2. Create a roster of older people whom you admire - Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, Jane Goodall, Paul Newman, Betty Ford, Madeline Albright, George H.W. Bush, Joan Didion, Maya Angelou, John Updike, Judi Dench.

3. Really understand that a balanced view of aging can help you change your attitude in a way that can make a difference in the long-term quality of your life.

The Backyard Parables -- Finding The Soul Of Your Garden

Mid-summer gardening season is the best time to read one of my favorite books by Margaret Roach. She was an editor at The New York Times, a fashion and garden editor at Newsday, the first garden editor for Martha Stewart Living magazine, and the editorial director of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.  But it is her most recent chapter, that has proven the most inspiring.  In her 2011 memoir And I Shall Have Some Peace There: Trading In the Fast Lane For My Own Dirt Road, Margaret shared her journey from an urban, over-stressed, unhappy corporate executrix to a rural one-woman horticultural incubator of plants, ideas and community.  For anyone considering their own "plan c" all I can say is, read it. Of her new book, The Backyard Parables, Elizabeth Gilbert has written, "As a passionate, hopeful, and often self-delusional gardener (the only kind of gardener there is!), I loved this book.  Margaret Roach writes with intelligence, compassion, and -- most of all -- sanity.  Her work is a blessing."

Here are a few pearls from her life-earned wisdom.

I particularly love Margaret's advice to learn, again, how to to see -- with your heart.

"Making any garden, but especially one with more than one-trick-pony performance in spring or summer, requires a combination of tactics, not all of them horticultural. There must be water that remains unfrozen, whatever the weather—even a little water, a trough or a birdbath or a small-scale in-ground pool with the right-sized floating heater to keep it open, not iced over. No other element works harder than water to sustain the garden’s community; we are all made of it. And yes, you must also select good plants with a range of features and peak moments, and site them well—easiest to accomplish by first going inside and looking out the window, imagining what the desired view is before digging any holes. But that’s all the intellectual part—make a water feature, choose multi-season plants— that’s part of the “how-to.”

I am fairly certain that to make a 365-day garden you must also learn all over again how to see—to see beyond the big blue Hydrangea and other obvious show-offs, right down to the shapes of buds and textural complexity of bark, and the way the play of light and shadow, sounds and smells, and even movement contribute to the living pictures. When I go lecture to garden groups, a process that builds to a crescendo of incessant (insane?) hand- waving as I speak, I always notice that I touch my chest reflexively when I talk about this last bit, as if to say, “You must learn to see with your heart; the eyes won’t do in the hardest months.” You must look viscerally, not somatically; it will take you in the direction of the light. This critical cultivation of the other senses forges a deeper communion between garden and gardener, and recognition of the one life cycle “it” and we are both part of."

And as a complete math-phobe, by connecting gardening to art and music, Margaret has helped me forge an entirely new relationship with my garden.  I'd always thought of it in terms of its palette, but never its rhythm.  I want to be "one part artist, one part scientist, and one part honeybee!"

"Actually, though I spared the uncannily numbers-savvy child this thought at the time, gardening is like mathematics, too— and not just in the way nature engineers things like the branch- ing pattern of trees, as Leonardo da Vinci noted more than five hundred years ago, or designs patterns such as honeycombs, spiderwebs, or butterfly wings that can be described mathematically. In the garden you need to know when to giveth, and when to taketh away, or it just doesn’t amount to anything out there but an incalculable mess. There is a rhythm to the goings-on, albeit somewhat more improvisation than John Philip Sousa; it’s never the same from one season, or year, to the next, or even day-to-day. And then there is this further layer of complexity to the calculation: Forces other than yourself will be doing both adding and subtracting all the while, too, right alongside you but without the respect of advance notice, making any possible mathematical proof a moving target.

There is a higher aspect to this comparison of codas and computations. Galileo famously said nature speaks the language of mathematics, and various prominent contemporary scientists, including the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, agree. “To those who do not know mathematics,” Feynman said, “it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature.”

On this latest point, the math of really seeing, I think it helps to think as if of three minds: one part artist, one part scientist, one part honeybee—to be one part of each and to witness nature from that triple perspective if you can, and without prejudice. But don’t forget your abacus, because in much of the day-to-day of making a garden out of a tiny corner of the natural world, there is counting, lots of counting, and keeping track."

And not only did The Backyard Parables change the way I see and experience my garden, Margaret also has given me the benefit of her years of trial and efforts -- quintessential insider's tips -- to make sure my new vision will be realized.  Talk about blessings!

It's Summer, Let's Go Fly Some Kites

Ray Bethell lives in Vancouver, BC Canada, and is believed to be the world's premier multiple kite flyer.  This video is an representative example of his ephemeral art: a flawless physical mastery in the service of beauty. He started sport kite flying in 1980 and for many years flew in team competitions with his team “The Vancouver High Flyers."  He taught himself to fly two sport kites simultaneously, with one kite manipulated from the hip while he steered the other with his hands. By adding special handles to his kites, he was later able to add a third to his routine: one attached to his waist, one in the left hand and the last in his right hand. Enjoy.

The Business Case for Reading Novels

This piece originally appeared in The Harvard Business Review.

I thought it was worth reposting during the summer holidays when novel reading beckons. I've been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child's newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn't I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Or catching up on my back issues of The Economist? That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I'm reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.

Over the past decade, academic researchers such as Oatley and Raymond Mar from York University have gathered data indicating that fiction-reading activates neuronal pathways in the brain that measurably help the reader better understand real human emotion — improving his or her overall social skillfulness. For instance, in fMRI studies of people reading fiction, neuroscientists detect activity in the pre-frontal cortex — a part of the brain involved with setting goals — when the participants read about characters setting a new goal. It turns out that when Henry James, more than a century ago, defended the value of fiction by saying that "a novel is a direct impression of life," he was more right than he knew.

In one of Oatley and Mar's studies in 2006, 94 subjects were asked to guess the emotional state of a person from a photograph of their eyes. "The more fiction people [had] read," they discovered, "the better they were at perceiving emotion in the eyes, and...correctly interpreting social cues." In 2009, wondering, as Oatley put it, if "devouring novels might be a result, not a cause, of having a strong theory of mind," they expanded the scope of their research, testing 252 adults on the "Big Five" personality traits — extraversion, emotional stability, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and correlated those results with how much time the subjects generally spent reading fiction. Once again, they discovered "a significant relation between the amount of fiction people read and their empathic and theory-of-mind abilities" allowing them to conclude that it was reading fiction that improved the subjects' social skills, not that those with already high interpersonal skills tended to read more.

Theory of mind, the ability to interpret and respond to those different from us — colleagues, employees, bosses, customers and clients — is plainly critical to success, particularly in a globalized economy. The imperative to try to understand others' points of view — to be empathetic — is essential in any collaborative enterprise.

Emotions also have an impact on the bottom line. A 1996 study published in the journal Training and Development assessing the value of training workers at a manufacturing plant in emotional management skills — teaching employees to focus on how their work affects others rather than simply on getting the job done — found that union grievance filings were reduced by two-thirds while productivity increased substantially. And a study of a Fortune 400 health insurance company conducted by Peter Salovey, a psychology professor at Yale, looked at the correlations between emotional intelligence and salary and found that people rated highest by their peers in emotional intelligence received the biggest raises and were promoted most frequently.

To bring the subject home, think about how many different people you interact with during the course of a given day — coworkers, clients, passing strangers, store clerks. Then think about how much effort you devoted to thinking about their emotional state or the emotional quality of your interaction. It's when we read fiction that we have the time and opportunity to think deeply about the feelings of others, really imagining the shape and flavor of alternate worlds of experience. Right now, I'm in the middle of Irene Nemirovsky's posthumously published novel about France's fall to the Nazis in 1940. Her simple sentences sketch a sense of uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and heartbreak — feelings I certainly wouldn't want to dwell on in "real" life, but emotions I'm better off for having taken the time to consider.

But nourishing empathy doesn't require such grimness. And if you want your diet of fiction, as it's shaping your mind to be more emotionally acute, to be specifically relevant to work, there is a body of great literature about business and organizational behavior. For instance, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, inspired by 19th century financial scandals among the British elite, resonates powerfully today. In his autobiography, Trollope wrote that "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places, has become at the same time so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable. If dishonesty can live in a gorgeous palace with pictures on all its walls, and gems in all its cupboards, with marble and ivory in all its corners, and can give Apician dinners, and get into Parliament, and deal in millions, then dishonesty is not disgraceful, and the man dishonest after such a fashion is not a low scoundrel. Instigated, I say, by some such reflections as these, I sat down in my new house to write The Way We Live Now." Seems fairly au courant to me.

From now on, I'm going to feel less like an escapist slacker when I'm engrossed in a new novel. In addition to the Trollope, below are some of my favorite books to get you started.

Kurt Andersen, Turn of the Century — set in 2000 and 2001, a successful TV producer husband and digital entrepreneur wife, trying to balance the demands of work and life, wind up pitted against each other as executives in a U.S. media empire. His mistrust grows when she becomes a favorite of the Rupert Murdoch-like chairman. Meanwhile, their hedge-fund-manager best friend is involved in big-time stock manipulation. (Full disclosure: my husband is the author)

Jane Austen, Sandition — in this unfinished fragment of a novel, Austen departs from her typical marriage plot to describe the zealous entrepreneurialism of a real estate speculator. While we can never know how the novel would have ended, we can be pretty sure his housing bubble will burst.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House — Dickens' tenth novel explores the human cost of prolonged litigation through the eyes of Esther Summerson, who is caught up in a multi-generational dispute over the disposition over an inheritance. Anyone who has ever been entangled in a lawsuit will revel in the characterization of the process. At the time of publication, 1852–1853, public outrage over injustice in the English legal system helped the novel to spark legal reform that culminated in the 1870s.

William Gaddis, JR — in the 1976 National Book Award winner, the 11-year old protagonist, JR, secretly trades penny stocks, using the tools of the trade at the time — money orders and payphones — to build a fortune. Written entirely in dialogue, the absurdity of a precocious child's feat satirizes as Gaddis put it, "the American dream turned inside out." His description of dysfunctional boards and the corrosive effect of corporate takeovers and asset stripping are as current today as they were 30 years ago.

Joseph Heller, Something Happened — Heller's stream of consciousness second novel follows a regular-joe middle manager as he prepares for a promotion. The messy interweaving of his thoughts about his job, family, sex, and childhood perfectly distill how complicated the selves we bring to work really are.