Elizabeth Benedict Is Giving It Away Online

Novelist Elizabeth Benedict has an essay in the new issue of Daedalus called “What I Learned About Sex on the Internet,” and she’s willing to send you a PDF of it if you contact her through her website (although you might also consider ordering the magazine online) . Benedict’s guided tour of the search results for “sex” on Google takes alluring detours into the world of Christian porn, Benedict’s stint as a columnist for the Japanese edition of Playboy and the sorts of weighty subjects that come up when one’s staring at the web at 3:00 A.M. Face it: Sexual experimentation doesn’t get much safer than this, and though I’m not making any assumptions about your capacity for fun in other venues, I’m reasonably certain you’ll enjoy it.

3 July 2007 | read this |

Read This: The Dip

This weekend, Reuters filed a review of The Dip, the new book from Seth Godin about the middle ground between beginner’s luck and genuine expertise, that moment in every venture where things start getting hard and you need to work to be the best. Now, most of us have grown up hearing that we have to stick those moments out, but Godin tells us, as the review puts it, that “winners quit fast and quit often and only stick when they find the right dip to conquer.”

Like much of what Godin writes, this is a powerful little book, and that’s why I brought Godin to “Be Happy, Dammit!” last month to talk with Karen Salmansohn about his ideas. (Download the MP3 directly.) I’ve learned a lot from Godin over the years about achieving greatness, and this is valuable advice on a rarely discussed aspect of that goal. And it’s really short, too—less than a hundred pages. So you could polish it off in a single afternoon, if you apply yourself!

23 June 2007 | read this |