An unfortunate cut from the Opening Ceremony
If you ask me, this performance of Get Lucky by the Russian Police Choir should have been moved into the Opening Ceremony and televised on NBC. These guys display some serious want, amiright?!
Gamifying savings
The lottery is the one pathway to wealth where poor people have an equal footing with rich people. Lottery players know the chance of getting rich with a lottery ticket is infinitesimally small. The point is that without one, the chance is zero.
What if saving could be like a lottery?
The idea of rewarding savings with prizes dates from at least 1694, when Britain, desperate to pay off war debt, lured savers with a jackpot. Prize-linked savings exist in some form in at least 18 countries today. Perhaps the experience most relevant for the United States is Britain’s Premium Bonds, established in 1956. The interest on the bonds isn’t repaid to the holders. Instead, it goes into a prize fund. Every pound savers put in (to a maximum of £30,000) gives them a chance to win a monthly £1 million jackpot plus a million different smaller prizes — all tax free. The program was begun as “Savings With a Thrill,” and the winning numbers were announced each month by celebrities.
At the program’s 50th anniversary, there was £32 billion in bonds — providing the government with capital at a cheaper rate than borrowing. Nearly 40 percent of Britain’s population — 23 million people — hold Premium Bonds. They are sometimes, but not always, the best savings deal — there is often a product whose return is better than the odds of what you’d win with Premium Bonds with average luck. But that’s the point: even though they might not be the left-brain choice, they get people to save.
From the NYTimes Fixes Blog, an idea to incentivize more savings. Doesn't sound any worse than most other ideas I've read to drive Americans to save more. In fact, it sounds better.
Snow Day
Artist Tomer Hanuka provides the cover image “Snow Day” for The New Yorker this week.
It's actually an image he released as a print titled “Perfect Storm” many years ago. The morning the print went on sale I forgot to log on and by the time I remembered it had sold out. I still have pangs of regret that I wasn't reserve one. Otherwise I own many of his other prints, all of which are framed and hanging in my apartment.
“Snow is inherently nostalgic. It encourages you to travel back and think about your life. I think it’s something about the way it blankets reality, sort of erasing the present one dead pixel at a time. And that makes room for the past,” says Tomer Hanuka, about his image “Perfect Storm.”
*****
“I moved to New York in my early twenties, after being in the Israeli Army for three years,” Hanuka says. “I have this image of myself in my first rental apartment, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring at the window. You encounter the world as an adult for the first time—I think that’s what the story was about. That’s a powerful thing. Every window you stared through before was your parent’s world, and now, suddenly, you’re in a city. You’re washed with optimism and a sense of freedom—you’ve just been liberated and that’s amazing. And then you realize you can do very little, and it’s terribly disappointing. But the heartache and all that, that comes later.”
For more from Hanuka, browse some of his other illustrations online or purchase this book collection of many of his prints.
5 best punctuation marks in literature
Kathryn Schulz offers her list of the greatest punctuation marks in literature, and it is a wonderful one.
3. The ellipses in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go, and make our visit.Okay, I concede: The most famous ellipses of all time is not in "Prufrock." It is not in literature at all. It is in the text crawl at the beginning of Star Wars (“A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …”), which I can’t read without hearing that crashing first chord of John Williams’s score, and which I admire even while wishing George Lucas had seen fit to include one more comma.
But we are here to talk about literature, and, in that domain, Eliot wins the ellipses game. Everything in "Prufrock" is elliptical: those meandering streets, the foglike cat (fog and cats: name me two things more evasive), the hundred revisions, the perfume-inspired digressions — and all this is to say nothing of the five other literal ellipses in the poem: “lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows … ”; “asleep … tired … or it malingers”’ “I grow old … I grow old … ” — aging in those very pauses, it seems. But by far the most yawning chasm in the poem is the first one: What overwhelming question, Eliot? The candidate options, as I see it, are “What is the meaning of life?” and “Hey, so, would you maybe want to have dinner with me sometime?” Existential exposure, romantic embarrassment: Poor Prufrock, no wonder he trails off into that visual stutter.
Beauty
Via Digg, this video makes for a cool running screensaver for your TV the next time you have people over to do LSD. Rino Stefano Tagliafierro took classic oil paintings and put them into motion with what is commonly known as the 2.5D Effect, or the "thing they did in The Kid Stays in the Picture."