Monday Afternoon Bike Rides For The People

While extolling the virtues of idleness to highly educated and compensated persons who are likely to find his New York Times post, writer Tim Kreider does offer a passing dollop of empathy for the really working class -- those with backbreaking and sometimes multiple poorly-paid jobs who aren't busy so much as exhausted and dispirited. No question we should all do fewer e-mails while on vacation in Hawaii or during our Alaskan cruise. But by large his is a prescription available only to those who wish to be members of a healthier ruling class. What dockworker, domestic, paralegal, or flight attendant wouldn't love Tim Kreider's life? Sounds good to me:

I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know. Like most writers, I feel like a reprobate who does not deserve to live on any day that I do not write, but I also feel that four or five hours is enough to earn my stay on the planet for one more day. On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day. And if you call me up and ask whether I won’t maybe blow off work and check out the new American Wing at the Met or ogle girls in Central Park or just drink chilled pink minty cocktails all day long, I will say, what time?

It Took Two Steves To Make An Apple

"Lone geniuses are out," Susan Cain writes. "Collaboration is in." Companies, schools, and even churches are relentlessly trying to get people to work together even when they'd rather work, play, and pray alone. Many of us, and especially introverts, do our most creative thinking by ourselves, and with the warrant of Picasso himself, who said, "Without great solitude, no serious work is possible." Cain, who has a book coming out called Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking, suggests we acknowledge and harness both aspects of our social temperament:

[M]ost humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Don's Snowflakes

You know that guy at the office, Mr. Passive-Aggressive? Never says what he thinks in a meeting but then sends e-mails around dissing everybody and taking credit for their ideas? What if he's running the Pentagon? Condi Rice, President Bush's first-term national security adviser, wastes little time in her new memoir, No Higher Honor, before getting to the nub of her and and Secretary of State Colin Powell's problems with Don Rumsfeld:

Don would send memos (snowflakes, we called them) that implicitly -- and sometimes explicitly -- criticized what State or the NSC was doing. Often those memos reflected discussions that had already taken place, but they left the impression that it was Don imparting new wisdom or making an important recommendation. In meetings, he would ask Socratic questions rather than take a position.