A Curious Mind

Sick of the Heat? Try One of These Cool Vacations. The Street, 6/20/08

There's not a whole lot that's wrong with summer, seasonally speaking: trees in full foliage, flowers in bloom, relaxing swims in a lake or ocean, long sunset evenings sipping wine in outdoor cafes, the tacit agreement that no one really works on Fridays. Not a lot wrong except when you're in the middle of a wretched heat wave.

When it gets much above, say 85 degrees, and when it's humid, I start to fantasize about the Fall. But rather than wishing the season away, why not plan a vacation to somewhere cool and delightful instead? Reprising my popular story which ran in Inc. last year, here's the 2008 edition of my picks for summer  destinations that are cool in temp, as well as cool in other ways:

1. San Francisco (pictured above)
2. Chile
3. Buenos Aires
4. Kangaroo Island in Australia
5. St. Petersburg, Russia
6. Iceland
7. Norwegian Fjord country

The only repeater from my 2007 list is Iceland. Although I still highly recommend each of the destinations on last year's list, there are so many wonderful places on the planet  that it seemed a shame to repeat at all. But Iceland is such a great place to go in the summer time, and it's a quick plane hop for anyone on the East Coast, and there was this really cool tour on offer, so I figured I pretty much HAD to include it.  I would have also included Alaska this year if I hadn't recently written about it in my column.

Blog: Your Memoir Has Been Written

We all know there's been a memoir-craze over the past few years, and the good folks at Entertainment Weekly (one of my fave magazines, btw) have compiled a selective list by subject matter.

I love the list and was pretty tickled by it, but as a writer and writing teacher, I do object to this notion that your life has to be extreme to find good material in it. In it Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly is quoted as saying:

'Well, you were a drug addict, but did you kill anybody? Well, you killed somebody, but did you do it with your bare hands? Well, you were hungry, but were you as hungry as Frank McCourt? The more that's written, the harder it is to come up with something new or dramatic to say.''

In the let's-sell-the book sense that's obviously true, but all you writers out there, I beg of you: strike Nelson's words from your brain.  I mean, writing about life and its problems and woes has been going on since.. writing began.  No one has said anything really new in centuries. So the last thing on the planet that we need now is a bunch of writers sitting around trying to hatch up something new or dramatic. What we need is writers sitting down and really thinking through their lives through the lens of story. (To have a good story, you need to have strong characters that want something, and either achieve their goals or fail to through conflict, which you then render vividly. Read Lagos Egri, The Art of Dramatic Writing).

With personal writing like memoir, the last thing you need to do is think about your "competition" while you're writing. More essays and memoirs die on the vine from the thought: this has been done before. Don't worry about it.  Do your writing. Write it well. Worry about the sales strategy after you've finished.

Sandra Day O'Connor Rules Video Games -- The Huffington Post, 6/4/2008 & The Chronicle of Philanthropy 6/5/2008

I really had fun watching Sandra Day O'Connor speak today at the Games for Change conference which I attended for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, story here.

For the Huffington Post, here's a first report on what I assume is the only retired Supreme Court Justice involved in developing a video game.

Blog: World Without Oil

I'm in the midst of attending the Games for Change conference, where I learned about something called Alternate Reality Games, in which the lines between truth and the game are blurred --for example, imaginary characters in the game have real-world phone numbers that you can call, and listen to their voice mail, you get GPS coordinates to actual pay phones which lead you to other clues and so on.

One example I'm very taken with is World Without Oil  a fictional documentary project which asked people to imagine what their lives would be like during the first 32 weeks of a massive oil crisis --in which gas hits more than $6 a gallon, which is now not that hard to imagine.  Over this time, 1,500 people wrote in and shared their imaginings of "what if".

What's the point?

Ken Eklund, the creator, said at the conference:

I did not feel that there was a very good narrative, a good point of view of what the future of  as actually going to be like. You had people who had opinions of what was going to happen, in every case, these are top down opinions. I was interested in tapping into the web 2.0.

We could ask those people, if there’s an oil crisis, how will your job be doing? If you drive a truck for a living? If you're in travel? We wanted to get people recognizing what their vulnerability was. We didn’t have a real solution to our oil dependency, we didn’t advocate anything, we deliberately created a vacuum of it, we said, let’s get the hive mind engaged on defining the problem. The players came forward and said "I'm starting to share your concern, let me add the thing I’m expert on, I know how an oil crisis is going to affect my life."

This is all very interesting, but thinking about it this morning is taking me off the subject of global warming, and on to the subject of the future of my career, the future of being a nonfiction writer.

The value a nonfiction writer brought to the world used to be easy to describe. We go forth in the world, and find out what people think, and know, and tell everyone else these stories. But I think that way may be finished, or, to be more accurate --it's finishing.  In Alternate Reality Games and in all of these new forms of media, people are telling their own stories, without mediation.

The new value of a nonfiction writer I think will be to tell our own stories, the stories only we can tell, based on some unusual experience or expertise. And, the knowledge and the application of actual narrative craft.

UPDATE: I blogged about this a bit more at the Renegade Writer.

Silverjet Folds, Mass Luxury Finished? --The Huffington Post, 5/30/08

The all-business class airline Silverjet folded today, provoking these thoughts from me on the demise of "mass luxury" for the Huffington Post.

A bit more info for those geekily and freakily interested in income statistics. When I was Editor-at -Large at the late, lamented American Demographics magazine, one of the side benefits was the uncanny nerdy ability to spout statistics about the US population. It's a skill I no longer have, alas, which I believe makes me less fun to have at cocktail parties.

If I thought people were engaging in too much self pity over not having a housekeeper or a new car, I liked to break out my favorite downer stat: how little money most Americans live on. I think most people of a certain socioeconomic group assume that most two-income households easily crack $50,000 a year, but, that's not true: median income today is well shy of $49,000. And because I have always either lived or spent a lot of time in New York City, I was often assured that these rules simply didn’t apply to New York where everyone simply had to earn more just to survive.

Hogwash. I had to look back to 2003 to get the kind of data I wanted, but back then, in the US, median household income was $43,564, and about 14% earned $100,000. In New York City, median income was actully lower $39,937, and only about 15% earned over $100,000.

Oh, that includes the outer boroughs though. So just in Manhattan (or New York County) it’s higher: median $47,415, and about 24% earned $100,000 or more, but that still means that the vast majority of people in Manhattan ain’t rolling in it –it’s just that the ones that are are making out really well.

You can read much, more more on this page at the Census Bureau's website.

How to Tell a Great Vacation Story --The Street, 5/27/08

Take any interesting vacations lately?

Please don't answer that question until you read my latest column for The Street. I got the idea for this story when I attended the Inc. 500 conference this past September. I overheard attendees making vacation-related but eye-glazing, snore-inducing small talk, and thought to myself: this must stop.