Word: souping
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...belief that two people together are exponentially more powerful than two people alone. "In the last 30 or 40 years, a lot of politics turned into marketing," explains Marshall Ganz, a Harvard professor and community organizer who has worked with Obama. "Marketing is all about selling soup to individuals. It's not about bringing people together." Obama's model, which has made him the envy of a generation of political consultants, focuses both on selling the soup and on giving his supporters the tools to make soup together - for one another. (Watch a video about Obama paraphernalia...
...this one affects everyone. It's hard to feel sorry for people for whom retrenchment means shifting from the private jet to commercial first class, but it does mean we're all having the same conversation, and psychologists point out we're happier when we're all in the soup together. The notion that misery loves company may be less about malice than about solace: that problems shared grow smaller, that courage is contagious. Is it just a coincidence that Mississippi, which typically ranks as the most generous state in charitable giving, is also the poorest? To suffer alone...
...Lowdown: The new year is upon us. Break out the optimism, the resolutions and the thinly-veiled self-help books. There are some, like Henry Alford's How To Live that hide their chicken-soup soul within the well-structured tale of a fruitful personal journey. Then there are those such as Rich Like Them, whose vigorous attempts to shake off the label ("It's not what you think of as a traditional self-help book...I chose instead to look at the context of these lives, to tell people's stories"), just end up making the author sound slightly...
...Lowdown: With its self-helpish title, How To Live might easily be mistaken for a book full of aphorisms and life lessons - a Chicken Soup for the Non-Elderly Soul. Thankfully, Alford is smarter than that, and his book is impressively understated in its desire to actually impart wisdom. It's more a collection of mini-profiles on fascinating senior citizens - the aforementioned Granny D., whose advanced age does nothing to lessen her spunk, the self-obsessed actress Sylvia Miles, and the simply bizarre hitchhiking, dumpster-diving Eugene Loh. The inclusion of Alford's elderly mother, who decided to divorce...
...slower. When I run now I feel 15 years younger. And I do sleep a lot better and I did have to buy a new wardrobe, so that was very cool. Another sort of hidden benefit is that my eating has become even simpler. Yesterday I made vegetable soup. It took like 10 or 15 minutes to throw it together and it was really good. It's not that I wouldn't have done that before, but I would have thrown in a sausage or some bacon or a bunch of croutons and now it's like five ingredients: Carrot...