Phoenix of Love

It is easy to see why we of the industrialized world love return policies and money-back guarantees. We are a culture of cautious, risk-averse, thoroughly insured thinkers. We pride ourselves on our ability to deliberate ourselves to the absolute best possible choice. We are paralyzed with fear lest the fifty dollar automatic apple slicer we [...]

Handy visual budget calculator: http://www.cnbc.com/id/26641187/

There’s a key principle that often gets lost in the din as our lives become more and more complicated: anything that is going to stay around needs to generate more than it consumes.
A friend once gave me the memorable advice that in life we need to be able to manufacture our own happiness. Too often [...]

Pain, like noise, is one of those vague nouns that reduces a vast array of sensations to a single, dull concept.
Today, I’ve been wishing that a particular collection of excruciating jaw pains were more of a concept and less of a sensation. It’s occurred to me, though, that the concept of pain—all our thinking about [...]

When you hear the phrase “crayon art,” chances are that the image that pops into the gray matter is one of those squiggly compositions that your parents displayed on the refrigerator door when your age was solidly in the single digits. Galleries and museums probably don’t enter into the picture.
A fellow by the name of [...]

I’ve been reflecting on how much the feeling of control influences happiness. It is really very difficult to get into a state of flow—to get engrossed in what you are doing—without feeling in control, and when you can’t get into that state of flow regularly, your satisfaction with life inevitably plummets.
I think that one of [...]

The German TV licensing agency has been missing some important details.
In October, they threatened the German poet Friedrich Schiller with legal action if he failed to pay his 17 euro TV license for the month. Sadly, Mr. Schiller was unable to settle his account, as he had been deceased since May 1805.
Following up on this [...]

Everyone seems to have ideas and theories about the state of the world economy. Most of the discussions revolve around this notion of a downward spiral of decreasing spending—people are spending less, decreasing businesses’ revenue; in order to stay profitable, the businesses lay off employees, which makes people even more reluctant to spend.
The implicit goal [...]

When frustrated with our confusion, my high school physics teacher often liked to say, in a lilting accent with rolled r’s, that “there’s a difference between wrong and absolutely ridiculous.”
It may not be for the reasons that he had in mind, but I think there is definitely a difference: being wrong is boring.
Being absolutely ridiculous [...]

Language learning fascinates me. A while back, I heard about a website called Livemocha that takes a community-oriented approach to language learning. It’s a bit of a cross between Facebook, Wikipedia, and the much-acclaimed Rosetta Stone language tutoring software, which teaches with images rather than by association with your native tongue.
On Livemocha, you can take [...]