That’s a mistake.

Go straight for what sets you apart and makes you awesome without wasting synaptic activity on an empty “we are…” introduction, sucking all of the power out of what comes next.

To illustrate:

Thea Joselow: I am a supermodel.

See? No.

Thea Joselow: Supermodel.

More better. If equally erroneous.

Say what sets you apart, not *that* it sets you apart… you know? Like, Nike doesn’t say “we are a…” anywhere. They just do it.

(yeah, I heard it too.)

Fighting diabetes in India using text messages

Reaching one million people with text messages about diabetes, Arogya World is creating a new model for health education and disease prevention

Read more…

When I had the opportunity to read Holy Sh*t, my first thought was “fuck yeah!”

I’m a professional writer and content consultant, and an amateur word nerd. Words and I go way back – back to the first word I ever uttered which was – delightfully – shit. And why not? I’m sure it was said around me. And the contexts in which people use expletives make these words sound powerful and important – they are uttered with force and conviction, no doubt leaving a stronger impression on a young mind than, for example, chair.

I’ve done some writing recently about feminism and about parenting – one makes me curse, and the other makes me think about trying to limit my cursing. At my daughter’s preschool parent-teacher conference, I apologized in advance for any f-bombs she may drop. Totally mea culpa.

And I really enjoyed reading this book. Most of us read Chaucer in school, and may recall lots of fart jokes and some of the saucier sections. But Holy Sh*t takes it way back beyond ancient Rome and their phallus obsession (oh, how little some things change) and explains what swearing meant in the Old Testament – what things meant, how they were used, what was considered off-color or off-limits, and how the concept of oaths went from a solemn promise to a casual obscenity.

Mohr explains that “for us today, certain words possess an offensive power far in excess of their literal meaning…” And one thing I missed was a better explanation of where the word “cunt” gets its excessive power today. Why should this word should be considered so very shocking? But I did like its introduction:

There is no record of cunt in English until the twelfth or thirteenth century, in Gropecuntelane, the name of a London street in the red-light district.

Overall, the book takes a pretty academic look at the long and proud tradition of dirty words – and doesn’t get too sensational… or perhaps sensational enough. You want a book about cursing to be juicy, no? But I can appreciate how hard it must have been to whittle down what to cover here – language is constantly evolving, the multitude of media available to the regular speaking public today has enabled probably a rapid and decentralized narrative that is easier to track since it’s all recorded, yet harder to parse since there is just so much data.

I did learn a lot about the bathroom habits of the ancient Romans (in a word: ew), and how swearing and oaths migrated from their originally religious context – consisting of solemn promises made between God and man – to more earthly pursuits.  For anyone interested in language and culture, you can learn a lot about a society by what it deems saucy or offensive. Our juiciest words say a lot about us.

They will have self esteem and martial arts training. Furthermore, you won’t know which ones are mine. Conduct yourselves accordingly. This will be your only warning.

Hugs,

A mother.

It’s not that I don’t believe in the equality of women, or that I don’t think the world is riddled with gender inequity. The word “feminist” has certain connotations, and is often uttered with a sneer by those who stand on the other side of a given issue. I edged away from the word because I didn’t want to be branded, or to have people write off my opinions because I formally took a side.

But why not?

Read the rest at The Broad Side.

I’m the most dangerous kind of subscriber – the one who thinks she knows something. And here are some thoughts that came to me as I was unsubscribing my way through my inbox.

Email Marketing: 5 Tips for a Better 2013

I totally should have waited a day so I could include a sixth item based on Ticketmaster’s spectacular fouling up of the Inaugural Parade and Ball ticket sales. Something along these lines:

6: Mistakes Happen. 

When you make a mistake – and you probably will – own it. Act quickly to find and implement a solution, be generous and authentic. Transparency should be your goal. Apologize, empathize, sympathize. You don’t have to lay down in the road or hand out fruit baskets, but acknowledge the error and promise you’ve learned from it. It’s really not that hard to treat everyone like your best customer.

Most simply – and misleadingly – this is the story of four school friends, one of whom is intellectually exceptional. There’s a woman (or two), and a tragedy. And we discover the truth about both at the tippy end. What it really turns out to be is the story of our illusions of self – and how we may not recognize ourselves when seen through the eyes of others, focused by the lens of time. Do I sound aggressively wistful? It’s a thoughtful, wisftul book – like the title. I’m describing it poorly, so I’m going to let the far more capable Liesl Schillinger of the New York Times sum up the main issue:

“The new book is a mystery of memory and missed opportunity. Tony Webster, a cautious, divorced man in his 60s who ‘had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded,’ receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier.”

The Guardian review calls it “a meditation on ageing, memory and regret,” which is way more tragic than I’d been feeling about it.

D and I agreed that it’s not an action-packed adventure, but that we both found it engaging. I sometimes have a pathologically short attention span (blame Twitter), and didn’t have any trouble speeding through this. I found it to be beautifully written, with characters that felt very authentic – they became more complex as time passed, and yet also more precisely what you knew them to be at the beginning. Which is one of the things I’m learning about life as I move through it. I really enjoyed the way Barnes tracked us through Tony Webster’s resume of life and accomplishments – moving the clock forward quickly, but reflectively.

D’s kind of got that part knocked, saying: “There’s something essential about his revelation that you’re always you. We look back on our earlier lives and fail to relate to ourselves. We look at the differences while others see the sameness of us through the years.”

It’s a story of aging and Tony’s thought process while trying – but not trying - but really trying – to reconcile what he knew and thought of himself with what he’s learning today. And it’s got a little twist at the end.

• The Sense of an Ending on JulianBarnes.com
• NYTimes Review: Julian Barnes and the Emotions of Englishmen
• The Guardian Review: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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• Next up?

In this guest post on the Armchair Advocates blog, I discussed some of the ways Arogya World marked the first anniversary of the UN High-level Meeting on Non-communicable Diseases. The upshot: A great team with an active imagination can do a lot with a limited budget.

I’m no scientist, but I am fan of science and those who practice it. I call myself a nerd, but I don’t think that claim would make it through peer review. The process of discovering what makes the universe, the world, and all of us tick is fascinating. And the more micro you get, the more macro the issues – it’s just amazing. I love the correlations, the conclusions and the anomalies that explicate the rules.

The Best Science Writing Online 2012 is a collection of online essays on scientific topics. The book covers a lot of ground, and topics great and small. It’s the sixth such compilation from editor Bora Zivkovic. Blog editor at Scientific American, and organizer of the ScienceOnline conference, Bora has a front row seat to the science blogosphere (God, I hate that word), and this book includes essays on a very wide variety of topics.

Fine writing is a beautiful thing. And fine scientific writing is beautiful in the way of fine scientific illustrations. Precise, clean and carefully edited to create an accurate representation and lay bare defining characteristics. They are instructional tools, but also works of art, like many of the essays in this compilation. The trick with both is keeping it accessible.

In this constellation of stories from a wide range of disciplines, a couple of lines seemed to sum it up better than I could, so let me allow the authors to speak for themselves.

First, from from “The Human Lake” by Carl Zimmer, I found this to be at once horrifying, but also the reason I love reading this kind of stuff. Here is just one little detail on how human health could be considered a matter of cultivating a healthy ecology:

“So try to imagine for a moment producing an elephant’s worth of microbes. I know it’s difficult, but the fact is that actually in your lifetime you will produce five elephants’ worth of microbial biomass. You are basically a microbe factory… The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one.”

Next, on discovery, and how new species are constantly being discovered in mundane, well-traveled and documented places. This quote is good advice for not just scientists, but students of all stripes, and also all writers and artists, and – well – everyone else. From “Man Discovers a New Life-Form At a South African Truck Stop,” by Rob Dunn:

“So pay attention when you are walking through forests and backyards and, yes, even truck stops. Take notes. Take pictures and assume that you are the very first one to see everything that you see. The life around us is as foreign as the dark side of the Moon; we just forget.”

Finally, and most topically, why science blogs? Well David Dobbs sums it up nicely in “Free Science, One Paper at a Time”:

“A blog may seem a sketchy way to publish science. Yet in a way it makes sense. Science, however rigorous, implicitly recognizes that every explanation is provisional; there is no finished version. So what could be more fitting than to revamp science through a platform explicitly built to be revised, commented on, and updated?”

Perfecto, no?

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I found myself frequently surprised at the longevity of her tenure there – particularly in the one position. She shares her thoughts on why she wasn’t promoted – eventually concluding more or less that there may have been opportunities for someone with more specific ambitions.

And at what point am I – here – writing about her book and her writing, versus judging how she chose to spend her life?

She starts by writing about her own experiences with some New Yorker luminaries, and I thought it was going to be kind of a colorful documentary of how the sausage is made. When it turned out to be – as advertised – her story, I may have expected a bit more. She’s a classy lady – this isn’t a saucy expose, and she’s not flip or careless with the reputations she protected for so long.

On the BookGraf Facebook page, the comments were grim. “Pretty painful…” “Not a page-turner…” Hey – these things happen. Woe betide anyone who reads my own musings on my professional life and aspirations (apologies to those of you who have) (also apologies for using the word “musings”). But I liked it – and her. Throughout, the book was careful and deliberate. Like the magazine I so trust and love.

• Meet The Receptionist: Algonquin Books Blog
• The Receptionist on Workman Books
• Janet Groth’s Website

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