Omnivoracious

Friday Night Videos: Bright Shiny Morning versus Vodka Chelsea

Welcome once again to Friday Night Videos, where we aim to give you the kind of match-ups you deserve for hanging out here on the weekend. Tonight, in honor of his guest posting right here at Omnivoracious, it's James Frey talking about his new book Bright Shiny Morning (May 13) versus Chelsea Handler talking about Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, which just hit the NYT bestseller list. Frey you already know about from his posts. Handler, who has a show on E! every weeknight at 11:30, is a little newer to the spotlight, but very talented. She's got incredible comic timing and has a great blend of irreverent, self-deprecating humor and biting satire. The Q&A from a bookstore gig displays her sharp wit and her quick-thinking approach to comedy. (More videos here.)

Sloane Crosley, Why Are You So Funny?

I picked up Sloane Crosley's I Was Told There'd Be Cake because of the dioramas.

Following a link on Critical Mass, I found that Crosley had not only created Plexiglas-encased diorama sets for her essays, she had also narrated video tours of them. (The full story of The Diorama Diaries is on her website, including a trip with her dad to a place called PlasticWorks.)

And, there's more. The book has a video trailer with paper pony stand-ups, a Hot Wheels ambulance, and a bit with fingers wearing pants that I can't really write about on this blog. Every book should have a video trailer.

Though Crosley has been widely published, with essays in the Village Voice, Playboy, Salon, and The New York Times, I Was Told There'd Be Cake is her first book.

I read the book. It was hilarious. I had questions, and she was kind enough to answer them. --Heidi

Amazon.com: People have compared you to David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, Dorothy Parker, even a post-modern Mary Tyler Moore. Do you relate to this at all or does it just seem like a way for people to place you in a category that readers can connect with in some way?

Sloane Crosley: A little bit of both. I try not to relate to the part of the Dorothy Parker comparison where she’s suicidal and swallows a bottle of shoe polish. But what huge and wonderfully distinct compliments each of those comparisons are. I don’t flatter myself by assuming I’m in the same ballpark as those people in terms of their end products. But I do hope that I have some of the same basic motivations behind writing humor essays.

Amazon.com: What has been the response to the dioramas and videos?

SC: So far the response has been quite positive. Then again, are people likely to become enraged by videos of dioramas? I certainly nose-dived into the crazy pool by making them to begin with and then soaked myself to the bone by having them filmed. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with the dioramas themselves. Maybe auction them off for charity. Diorama rescue.

T.A. Pratt's Poison Sleep Might Just Infiltrate Your Dreams

T.A. Pratt's Marla Mason urban fantasies, Blood Engines and now Poison Sleep, relate the adventures of a "smart, saucy, slightly wicked witch of the East Coast" who combats murderous hummingbirds, weird frogs, and all kinds of human enemies in these lively, imaginative supernatural thrillers with elements of humor and whimsy. I talked to Pratt recently via email about this evolving series...

Amazon.com: You have tentacles of fungus in your latest book--and that's the first page I flipped to, oddly enough, given my fascination with both squid and mushrooms.
Pratt: There's even more fungus in the fourth book--a whole sorcerer dedicated to things fungal, who worships the giant honey mushroom colony in eastern Oregon as a god...

Amazon.com: Okay, now you're just pandering! However, if you had to pitch your book to Hollywood in two sentences, what would you say?
Pratt: "Ass-kicking sorceress fights plague of nightmares. She also gets laid." Speaking of Hollywood, a company called Phoenix Pictures optioned the series a few months ago, and, without getting into specifics, it looks like cool stuff might potentially be happening, barring the usual sorts of distractions and derailments. Though, this being Hollywood, it'll be a while before anything definitively materializes--or definitively dissolves in a puff of vapor. I try to cultivate an air of detached optimism...

The Laboratory and the Real World (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)

[Ed.: And now Tim Harford has picked up his camera to reply to Dan Ariely in kind. See the full discussion here.]

Bothering the Coffee Drinkers: The Multi-Talented Doug Hoekstra

         

Doug Hoekstra has quietly become an icon of Americana music and the Nashville scene, writing beautifully spare songs that contain genius-level observations about people. As Wired magazine has said about Hoekstra "a lot of people write songs, Hoekstra writes five-minute worlds." So it comes as no surprise that Hoekstra also writes fiction and nonfiction, collected in Bothering the Coffee Drinkers, which won an Independent Publishing Book Award.

The book is just as fascinating as Hoekstra's music. I really can't put it any better than the Midwest Book Review: "Each detail segues compactly into the next and before you know it, the book has hooked you in a distinctly quirky and entertaining way. Like all great music, it sounds easy to do. As all great musicians know, this is a deceptive effect that is only maintained through constant work and practice. [Hoekstra] is like a quirky art collector, putting together odd bits and ends, and then making them into something with an effect so much more than the mere sum of their collective oddities."

Hoekstra has just released a CD, Blooming Roses, which consists of another eleven perfectly understated songs that incorporate elements of country, rock, and even jazz. From the easy-going "Naper Vegas Scrabble Club" to the quirky/driving "Your Sweet Love," Hoekstra has crafted some great new songs. I interviewed Hoekstra recently to talk about both writing and music.

The Rational Economist on the Couch (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)

[Ed.: Dan Ariely has chosen to make this week's response in his discussion with Tim Harford via YouTube. Enjoy.]

Teenagers Rational About Sex? (Author One-on-One: Tim Harford)

Dan, thanks for the kind comments about The Logic of Life. Anyone who read my Financial Times review of Predictably Irrational will know that the admiration is mutual.

Let me just make one small correction: I certainly don't say that high CEO pay is desirable; I think it grotesque. Half that chapter is devoted to explaining why--why can a system full of rational shareholders can deliver grotesque pay packets?

Now, let's discuss the central question: are human beings rational or irrational? Perhaps the best way to understand the different perspectives of the books is through an example, and since the sexual examples in both books have captured everybody's attention, I'll compare and contrast.

Dan wants to know whether our behavior changes when we're sexually aroused and more importantly, whether we are caught by surprise when it does. As always, his approach is to run an experiment, and he paints a picture that will forever be etched in my memory, of students masturbating over Saran-wrapped laptops, while answering multiple choice questions about whether they would use condoms, consider using date rape drugs, have sex with animals... (In case you're wondering, no, this kind of subject matter is not the only reason that Predictably Irrational has been a runaway success.)

What does he find? First, that his subjects give very different answers to these questions when in a calm frame of mind than they did when sexually excited. Second, that they did not predict the way their answers would change. Now, one could argue about this research. Maybe the Saran-wrapped laptop is not a good substitute for a real sexual encounter. Maybe the pornography did not change the subjects' preferences, but merely encouraged them to be more honest. But basically, I buy it. The research seems sound, and Dan's witty description of it is pretty unforgettable.

So, how is The Logic of Life different in the way it approaches this topic? I take a bird's eye view of the whole controversy over the so-called "teen oral sex epidemic"; I find out that, behind the hype, yes, teenagers are having more oral sex than they used to. But I also find that they are losing their virginities later and are more likely to use condoms. That isn't so much an oral sex epidemic as a safe sex epidemic. I argue, informally, that this would be a rational response of a typical teenager to increased education about pregnancy and particularly to the now near-universal knowledge of the threat of HIV/AIDS. (You can read a short article I wrote about all this in Slate. You can also see what Stephen Colbert made of it all here.)

Fine. But that's still a bit speculative. So then I look at some of the latest evidence from economics, which shows that state by state, when state legislatures introduce laws tightening up on the availability of abortion to teenagers, the rates of sexual infections in teenagers falls in those states, relative to that of adults. That shows that teens are switching to safer sex, or abstinence. This isn't some vague correlation (more conservative states = less risky sex) but a specific response from teenagers to laws that affected only teenagers.

"But that's rational!" spluttered one venerable journalist, when I told him about this. Well, yes--it seems so, doesn't it?

Okay--who's right? When you see both examples set against each other you realize that's not a smart question. Dan explains that our behavior changes when we're excited; I explain that teenagers have safer sex if a legal change increases the consequences of pregnancy. Obviously both those things could be true at the same time. I believe that both of them are true.

At the risk of making this seem like a big group hug in which everyone is right about everything, let me raise a point of disagreement. The Logic of Life leans on all kinds of evidence, everything from the kind of careful statistical work I describe above to the use of lab rats. Theory counts too, and so does the clever simulation work inspired by the likes of Thomas Schelling. Every type of evidence has its flaws. I think the weaknesses inherent in pure theory are obvious; so, too, are the weaknesses of the sort of data-detective work very common on modern economics. (I will let Dan say more about those weaknesses if he wants to.)

But the weaknesses of laboratory experiments are not always quite so evident, especially when they are described as compellingly as in Predictably Irrational. So, let me point them out. While laboratory experiments are great for creating controlled conditions, they also create artificial conditions. There are several examples of important clashes between what happens in the laboratory and what happens outside. We know, for example, that procurement managers systematically screw up when bidding in a laboratory auction, but they do much better job in the (apparently identical) real life auctions situations they face everyday.

The economist John List has tried to replicate some famous "predictably irrational" results from the laboratory; the results tend to evaporate in more realistic settings. In one example I describe in The Logic of Life, List shows that the "irrational" result (which is that people given an unexpected raise work much harder than they could get away with) only lasts for ninety minutes. A gratitude effect that lasts ninety minutes is not the basis on which to rewrite your company's human resources policy.

I'm not aware that any of Dan's experiments have been challenged in this way, and I was pleased to see that he often tried to carry out his work in realistic settings such as restaurants and bars. So this isn't an attack on his work--it's more of a question. Dan, how can we be confident that these experimental results hold up in real life? And what further work would you like to see, to make us more confident in them?

Your logical friend,

Tim

Rational or Irrational: The Logic of Life or Predictably Irrational? (Author One-on-One: Dan Ariely)

The Logic of Life is a wonderful book. In prose that is witty and entertaining, Tim Harford uses his keen economist's perspective to peel away the layers from a variety of unconventional examples, revealing the unexpected rationalities that lie at the hearts of subjects such as large executive salaries, smoking, and even racism. His exploration of these subjects enables the reader to understand how economists think, and the logic that often lies beneath the surface.

Take for example the case of executive pay. As Harford explains, there are some interesting economic principles underlying what we might otherwise consider exuberant CEO salaries (for example the $800 million that Disney paid Michael Eisner over his 13 years of service as Disney's CEO). First, Harford argues that very high salaries are desirable because they cause the executives to have more skin in the game and, as a consequence, will care more about their company. Harford also points out that these high salaries are not only intended to motivate the person who is getting the high salary, as they are also intended to motivate the people below them who might pull all-nighters for years and work much harder in hopes of one day attaining that enviable position. (Harford proposes a clever test of this idea in which the CEO doesn't do any work, making his position even more enviable.) Finally, Harford also points to the rational selfishness of the CEOs, the difficulty of tracking their actions, and the mysteries of accounting as other ways in which CEOs further increase their salaries.

These are very interesting ideas with a compelling and fascinating logic (although they are not very well tested from an empirical perspective). In my mind this is economic theory at its best. Beautiful, elegant, requiring some convoluted logic, and shedding light on what we see in the world around us.

What should we do with these insights from economics? If we trust the rational economic perspective completely, we should take steps to pay CEOs more, maybe give them more vacation time or pay them even more with stock options. But here is the catch: in order to move from a perspective that sheds light onto the question of CEO pay to an action plan that we can adopt wholeheartedly, we must not only believe in these principles, but we must also believe that nothing else matters (or at least that nothing else would make a big difference). So, should we trust that our powers of logical reasoning could provide us with a complete understanding of the role of incentives? The field of behavioral economics suggests that we should not rush to make this assumption and that, in fact, there are many forces that influence us without our understanding.

Let me give you an example. Imagine that I described to you some puzzles of different sorts that required memory, concentration, thinking, and creativity. Suppose I then asked you to predict how well people would perform on these games if they were promised a payment that depended on their performance. I would also tell you that for some people the payment was equivalent to 1.5 days of their income, for others it was equivalent to 2 weeks of their income, and for a third group it was equivalent to 6 months of their income. Who would you predict would do the best? If you are anything like the real participants in our experiments, you would predict the third group--the one with the highest pay--would have the highest level of performance.

When we ran this experiment (in India where we could pay people this much without completely depleting our research accounts) we found that participants did the worst when they were offered the highest pay. It turns out that money is a double-edged sword: it is a motivator but it is also a stressor. To get a better insight about this idea, imagine that I offered you $10,000 to come up with a creative idea in the next 5 minutes. How focused would you be on the creativity task and how stressed would you be? How much time would you dedicate to coming up with an idea and how much time would you spend thinking about the money that you are not going to get?

What is the big idea here? First, it turns out that incentives are a bit more interesting and complex than standard economics would have us believe--sometimes we can pay more and get worse performance. Second, it appears that our intuitions and logic are sometimes inaccurate in their ability to predicting human behavior. What does this say about relying on standard economics and pure logic as a tool to guide the type of incentive mechanisms we create? It tells us that when we try to understand these mechanisms, and in particular when we make recommendations for how these mechanisms should be designed (which is something economists do often), we should take all the input we can into account, including our irrational characteristics. Standard economics and logic can help us create systems that are useful for perfectly rational people, but behavioral economics will help us design a better world for the rest of us.

Irrationally yours,

Dan

Predictable Irrationality or Hidden Rationality?: Our First Author One-on-One

Now that we've started bringing authors onto Omni, we thought the next step would be to open the floor to two authors to talk directly to each other, without our getting in the way. (But feel free to get in the way yourself in the Comments section.) How often, for instance, would you like to see a book review, instead of serving as the final word, start a back and forth between the author and the reviewer (played out somewhere less infantile than the Letters to the Editor sandbox)? Or see debut authors trade notes about what it's like to have your first book published? We're hardly the first people to think of this sort of thing (Slate has done it well for years, although not as often as they used to), but it's new to us, so we're excited.

And we're excited about our first pairing, which was so glaringly obvious and potentially fascinating that it forced us into action. One of the liveliest and most popular new subgenres in publishing (along with Vampire Romance and Brett Favre Tributes) is Popular Economics, bustling with witty contrarian analyses of the ways the dismal science can illuminate our everyday lives, all coming in the wake of the blockbuster Freaknomics. But not all Pop Econ books are alike. In fact, on the surface, it looks like the two most popular new books in the genre this year, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational and Tim Harford's The Logic of Life, have a pretty basic disagreement. Ariely, says his book jacket, "refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways," while Harford's book jacket replies, "Under the surface of everyday insanity, life is logical after all." So, underneath it all, are we irrational or rational? (Or is one man's irrationality another's rationality?)

That's a fine disagreement to begin with, but from reading both books, you can tell the sides would not remain so simply divided (despite the doctored fight photo above that Ariely sent in when we proposed the idea--Ariely's in the red trunks and Harford's in the green, white and red). In part, this is a piece of a larger debate between traditional rationalist economics (Harford is an economics columnist for the Financial Times and Slate and the author of the bestselling Undercover Economist) and the newer field of behavioral economics (Ariely is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT), but more than that, it will be, I hope, a conversation between two smart and funny guys with a rare talent for connecting complex ideas to our daily lives.

The conversation actually began in February, when Harford wrote a largely positive review of Predictably Irrational in the FT. Here's a quote:

I could scarcely imagine a better introduction to “behavioural economics”, a discipline of growing influence that sits on the boundary between economics and psychology. But opinions differ among economists as to whether behavioural economics seriously challenges the long-held basic assumption of economics that we make rational choices, or whether it merely illuminates some fascinating but relatively minor human foibles.

Ariely continues things here on Omni with his first post today. Harford will follow later in the week, and for the next few weeks we'll keep roughly to a Monday/Thursday schedule. Please add your own comments to the discussion in the meantime, and thanks for joining us. --Tom

P.S. You'll notice Dan Ariely's photo a couple places on our page: our interview with him is also featured in the current episode of our Amazon Wire podcast (you can play the podcast in the right column of the blog while it's the current episode, or find it in the archives).

Junot Diaz, You've Just Won the Pulitzer... What Are You Going to Do Now?

Last summer, after turning over the last page of my advance galley of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I was floored by what I had just read and used any gathering of two or more people to announce to the world that it was my favorite novel of 2007. "You mean, so far?" No, the year. I was going all-in, even with a whole fall season of unread books in front of me.

So you can imagine how over-the-moon happy I was for Diaz last Monday when I heard that he'd won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. When I asked his editor, Sean McDonald, if he could help us get a few post-Pulitzer questions into Junot's inbox, I didn't expect Diaz would actually have the time to deliver (he'd just won the Pulitzer, after all!). But deliver he did, and along with the answers, he threw us the ultimate surprise--the opening passage (or what he calls "throat clearing") from the seemingly post-apocalyptic new book he's working on. Does this mean there's a Hugo Award in his future? We shall see...

--BTP

Amazon.com: Junot, first of all, congratulations! You've been on quite a ride since Oscar Wao came out last fall. You were awarded the Sargent First Novel Prize, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, topped countless Best of 2007 lists, and now the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Where were you when you found out you won the Pulitzer?

Diaz: I actually was in my mother's house in NJ. (Which, when you think about it, was where it all started for me, as an immigrant, as a young lover of books, in NJ.) The first call I could barely hear (my two-year-old nephew was having a bang-up time throwing his toys) so I went outside, out by the Hackensack River and called my agent, who hadn't yet gotten the official word. The real confirmation came ten minutes later. I was still on the bridge, freezing, and after a few minutes of stunned silence, just me and the traffic and the cattails, I walked home and gathered my mother and my sister and told them and I don't think I've ever seen them happier for me (though my mother did cry a little). My nephew was the best, he didn't give a damn about no Pulitzer, he just wanted me to chase him.

Amazon.com: I read online that "Diaz is not the first Latino to win the prize, but he is certainly the first cat from the streets to do so." How does that make you feel?

Diaz: I didn't have an easy childhood (who ever does?). I grew up super-poor, welfare, section 8 and food stamps all the way, in a community where us boys worried all the time about getting jumped and where mad people got recruited by the military. My mother was raising five kids on an income that didn't break ten grand a couple of years. She cleaned houses for people a lot better off than us and I still have this image of her on her hands and knees cleaning bathrooms. I'm as nerdy as they come, a deep lover of books, but those long hard years marked me as deeply as that river marked Conrad and maybe that's what the writer means when they say that I'm "from the street." If that's what the writer's getting at then I'll take it, I've no interest in erasing my particular version of the "American Experience." But if this is some hollow ghetto glorification... I didn't think I was so cool when I only had three shirts in high school and had to repeat twice a week. I didn't feel too "street" then. I felt like a goddamn loser.

Amazon.com: And what's it like to share the Pulitzer spotlight with Bob Dylan, who was awarded an honorary special citation?

Diaz: I'm one book, he's a lifetime. It feels great to be in such company. Now if somebody could score my goddaughters some tickets, I'll be the coolest godfather ever.

Amazon.com: Do all the awards make the over-a-decade gap between books worth the wait?

Diaz: The only thing that makes anything worth it is another book that moves people. But hey, in the meantime, the awards certainly keep you warm, psychically! No denying that.

Amazon.com: Hopefully we won't have to wait until 2017 until the next book?

Diaz: If I was the only writer in the world this would be a problem but luckily we have tens of thousands of cool writers to take the weight off. No matter who you're waiting for to publish I recommend a strong course of Samuel R. Delany (start with Dark Reflections and then graduate to his magnum opus Dhalgren) and my favorite crazy woman Natsuo Kirino (Grotesque). Always something on the shelves to keep you busy.

Amazon.com: Can you give us a little tease of what you're working on next?

Diaz: Oh sure, why not, who knows when it will ever see the light of day again. This is some opening throat-clearing from my next novel Dark America.

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is.

What I see. Usually just the f-ckedup hide of the truck.  Every now and then I lift my head a little and see the other Travellers sucked onto the metal of the container like remora.  See the fresca from the night before, long hair whipping back in thousands of everchanging streams. See: fields of white crosses, an endless proliferation of kudzu, a basketball game between the Junior Klan and the Uncle Muhammed Youth League--a regular five on five with a ref and everything so you know we're in the End Times for real. And sometimes, if I'm not careful, I see my mother and my brother standing by the edge of the road. She has her hand on his shoulder and they still got snow clotting up the spaces between their toes. They're waving. Since the transport is automated it switches its lights on only when it detects another vehicle or when we're in civilization but at night on the interstates it feels like we're rushing through a corridor of whooshing air as unlit as a vein. We pass cities and zonafrancas and fortress towns and overhead roar fighter jets and gunships and every now and then the transport will squash something on the road. A rumble under the tires and then the return to the lullaby of the whoosh as whatever it is gets spat out behind the mud flaps in ruin.

I don't try to look around too much. We are going over a hundred miles an hour and there is a little indio kid on my left who I'm trying to keep from blowing off the top of the transport. About an hour ago his pops lost his grip on him and screamed one of those miserable Noooo's that reaches into even me and before the kid could catch sky I leaned over and pulled him in. You should have heard his little heart, seen his little face. Stupid, attracting attention. A Samaritan I'm not. Believe me. I could just as easily have watched the kid sail and said, Wepa!

At times like these, even hardguys like me, all we should do is hold on. Plenty folks get peeled off the transports, especially kids and the thins, turned into axle grease which is why these rigs are plastered with signs in English, Spanish, Krïol, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian and Ghanaian: Stay The F-ck Off. Sometimes the local youth--when they're not immbolized on huff or bending each other over--will man the overpasses and drop debris on us, anything from bricks and firecrackers to hot oil and glass, get it all on ractives so they can spin the shit for laughs onto the net. The life of the Traveller, as they say, no es fácil. You should see how tired folks are after only a couple of hours on a transport. Praying for the next reforge, their arms trembling and these are the ones who got lucky and scored a roof spot. The ones who got to cling to the side rigging, muchacho, they're lucky if they're alive by the time we reach a depot.