“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty); or as a general litmus test to simply determine if an individual is an optimist or a pessimist. The purpose of the question is to demonstrate that the situation may be seen in different ways depending on one's point of view and that there may be opportunity in the situation as well as trouble. This idiom is used to explain how people perceive events and objects. Perception is unique to every individual and is simply one's interpretation of reality. The phrase "Is the glass half empty or half full" can be referred to as a philosophical question.
“I do tend to be an anxious fellow and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. I appreciate honesty. I appreciate confronting something head on and being given all the details first — and then responding to them in whatever way I might. At best, it simply confirmed who I am to myself. It helps me. For me, it works.”
In September 2010, Bill Scheft wrote “Nabob of Negativism” for The New York Times. The book jacket of “Half Empty,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
“Writer Melissa Bank said it best: 'The only proper answer to 'Why me?' is 'Why not you?' The universe is anarchic and doesn't care about us and unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. And in so many other ways, I'm so far ahead of the game. I have access to great medical care. My general baseline health, aside from the general unpleasantness of the cancer, is great. And it's great because I'm privileged to have great health. And I live in a country where I'm not making sneakers for a living and I don't live near a toxic waste dump. You can't win all the contests and then lose at one contest and say 'Why am I not winning this contest as well?' It's random. So truthfully, again, do I wish it weren't me? Absolutely. I still can't make that logistic jump to thinking there's a reason why it shouldn't be me.”
From NPR's Morning Edition: You might say Nora Ephron — raised in Beverly Hills, the daughter of New York playwrights who moved west to write screenplays for the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy — was born to tell stories. As an adult, Ephron worked as a journalist. Later she made her own name in the movies, writing When Harry Met Sally and directing scripts of her own — including Sleepless in Seattle and Julie & Julia. More recently, the 69-year-old Ephron has been sharing reflections on aging, first in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck and now in a new collection called I Remember Nothing. In the latter, Nora Ephron spins stories on a potpourri of subjects: divorce, disdain for egg-white omelets, and most especially memory loss. "I have been forgetting things for years – at least since I was in my 30s," Ephron writes in the book's opening paragraph. "I know this because I wrote something about it at the time; I have proof. Of course I can't remember exactly where I wrote about it or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to."
From Publishers Weekly: Reading these succinct, razor-sharp essays by veteran humorist (I Feel Bad About My Neck), novelist, and screenwriter-director Ephron is to be reminded that she cut her teeth as a New York Post writer in the 1960s, as she recounts in the most substantial selection here, "Journalism: A Love Story." Forthright, frequently wickedly backhanded, these essays cover the gamut of later-life observations (she is 69), from the dourly hilarious title essay about losing her memory, which asserts that her ubiquitous senior moment has now become the requisite Google moment, to several flimsy lists, such as "Twenty-five Things People Have a Shocking Capacity to Be Surprised by Over and Over Again," e.g., "Movies have no political effect whatsoever." Shorts such as the several "I Just Want to Say" pieces feature Ephron's trademark prickly contrariness and are stylistically digestible for the tabloids. Other essays delve into memories of fascinating people she knew, such as the Lillian Hellman of Pentimento, whom she adored until the older woman's egomania rubbed her the wrong way. Most winning, however, are her priceless reflections on her early life, such as growing up in Beverly Hills with her movie-people parents, and how being divorced shaped the bulk of her life, in "The D Word." There's an elegiac quality to many of these pieces, handled with wit and tenderness.
From The New York Times: Nora Ephron worries about a failing memory in the title piece of “I Remember Nothing,” her inviting new collection of essays. But even her most amnesiac readers still remember “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” the 2006 collection that this new book closely resembles. That resemblance is helpful in some ways and alarming in others. Each of these books is 137 pages long. Their covers are similarly formatted, with the same font used for the author’s name. One of Nora Ephron's back-cover portraits was taken by someone named Elena, the other by someone named Ilona; either way, Ms. Ephron looks attractive, accessible and well worth listening to. Her repackaged aperçus are now $3 more expensive than they were four years ago. She is now 69, not 65, and her sense of creeping mortality has changed accordingly. But the most salient comparisons are those between the lengths and origins of each book’s articles. “I Feel Bad About My Neck” had 15 entries, most of them tight, beguiling, exemplary essays written for print magazines (O, Vogue, The New Yorker) and The New York Times. “I Remember Nothing” has 23 pieces, and most of them are much shorter and less shapely. Some sound like the hurried Huffington Post blog entries that they seemingly were. The single strangest inclusion is a one-paragraph item titled “I Just Want to Say: Chicken Soup” and asks whether chicken soup creates colds instead of curing them. This is the inexplicably truncated lead paragraph of a much longer Op-Ed article from The Times headlined “The Chicken Soup Chronicles.” And all it amounts to is the wry, five-sentence version of a one-liner.
Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. She is best known for her romantic comedies and is a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay; for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle. She sometimes writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 and worked briefly as an intern in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.
After a satire Nora Ephron wrote lampooning the Post caught the editor's eye, the author landed a job at the New York Post, where she stayed as a reporter for five years. In 1966, Ephron broke the news in the Post that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a private ceremony three and a half months before. Upon becoming a successful writer, she wrote a column on women's issues for Esquire. In this position, Ephron made a name for herself by taking on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post; Betty Friedan, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of "docile" women." A 1968 send-up of Women's Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan resulted in threats of a lawsuit from WWD. While married to Bernstein in the mid-1970s, at her husband and Bob Woodward's request, she helped Bernstein re-write William Goldman's script for All the President's Men, because the two journalists were not happy with it. The Ephron-Bernstein script was not used in the end, but was seen by someone who offered Ephron her first screenwriting job, for a television movie. Ephron's 2002 play Imaginary Friends explores the rivalry between writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
From Time Magazine: For Justin Halpern, going home was his lucky break. A year ago, Halpern was a 28-year-old writer who after splitting up with his girlfriend swallowed his pride and moved back in with Mom and Dad. Now he has more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, a best-selling book and a TV series in the works with CBS, all thanks to his now 74-year-old hilariously blunt dad. It all started with this tweet on Aug. 3, 2009: "I didn't live to be 73-years-old so I could eat kale. Don't fix me your breakfast and pretend you're fixing mine." Halpern took his ridiculously popular Twitter feed and turned it into a book by the same name, which debuted at No. 8 on the New York Times best-seller list. Halpern, author of the crudely titled Sh*t My Dad Says, spoke to TIME about William Shatner playing his father on TV, his whirlwind year and, of course, dear old Dad.
Justin Samuel Halpern (born September 3, 1980) is the American author of the Twitter feed and best-selling book Shit My Dad Says. He is also the co-writer and co-executive producer of a CBS television situation comedy series based on the book. Justin Halpern grew up in the Point Loma neighborhood of San Diego, California. His father is Jewish and his Italian American mother is Catholic. His father, Samuel Halpern, M.D., is a radiologist, now retired, who practiced at the University of California San Diego. A blunt-spoken man, he gave memorable, expletive-laden advice and comments to young Justin from childhood on. Samuel Halpern has been described as "a profane comic genius," "Lenny Bruce with a stethoscope," "a scatological Socrates showering rough wisdom on his son."
Justin Halpern graduated from San Diego State University in 2003. He then headed for Hollywood looking for work as a writer. He wrote screenplays and waited tables, but success as a screenwriter eluded him. By 2009 he was a full-time writer for Maxim Magazine's online site and no longer needed to live in Los Angeles. He moved back to San Diego and wound up living with his parents. Justin Halpern had always kept a record of his father’s salty comments. Some, repeated to him by brothers, cousins and other relatives, go back to when he was 4 or 5 years old. When he started living with his parents, his record of his father’s remarks became a daily journal. On August 3, 2009, he started a Twitter feed, @shitmydadsays, just to have a place to store his father’s rhetorical gems. He thought he might use some of them someday in a script. On the Twitter site he explains, "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says." To his surprise he quickly gathered a large following on Twitter. A friend posted a link to his feed, then Rob Corddry tweeted it, and "that really jump-started it" according to Halpern. By mid-August he had more than 100,000 followers. By October he had a book deal with Harper Collins, and by November he had a television deal with Warner Bros. As of November 2010 his Twitter feed had more than 1.8 million followers.
Comedy Central recently said this, about Denis Leary's new book:
"Suck on this" is one of the most frequently used phrases in the English language, by everyone from paupers, kings, Pulitzer Prize winners and Celine Dion. Now Denis Leary is using it for the title of his new book, Suck on This Year, available wherever books are sold on Thursday, December 2 or for purchase here. But what else about this book? Good question, educated consumer. Here's what we know: Denis Leary jumps into the Twitter social networking revolution to help change the world we live in — to alert the masses and expose the facts about deceitful dictators and corrupt politicians — by gathering the truth and spreading it across the planet using the greatest weapon our democracy has to offer: jokes. Jokes, snarky asides and wise-ass banter. Disguised as tweets.
Leary is helping you LYFAO at 140 characters or less. Allow him to convince you further in the promotional video below and click past the jump for an exclusive outtake from Suck on This Year. Read your tweets in book form, you'll live longer.
There will be no peeking. No snitching. No playing with the Christmas ornaments. There will be no opening presents early. No staying up late waiting for Santa. And definitely no peeing of one's name in the snow. No, it isn't fair. That's just the way it is for a kid. 'Tis the season for temptation. It's these off-limits holiday enticements that are the focal point of "It's Christmas, David!" (Blue Sky Press), the new picture book from Los Angeles-area author and illustrator David Shannon, who paints this festive time from a child's point of view, with an impish spirit and in full-color detail. "Christmas is when you get in the most trouble and you get told 'no' the most. There's all this excitement that you have to be patient for," said Shannon, who, many years ago, was the David at the center of "It's Christmas, David!" and the other "David" books he's penned over the last dozen years on subjects as varied as potty training and getting ready for school.
December 06, 2010 - Garry Trudeau Views: 76,690 Aired: 12/06/10 Episode 06154 Obama tries to win over Republicans, and Garry Trudeau looks back on 40 years of "Doonesbury."
In 1970, three young alumni from the Harvard Lampoon started a national version of their campus humor magazine. It was called National Lampoon, and in the forty years since its launch, the Lampooon's humor and former members have permeated television, film, and just about every other cultural outlet in America. Rick Meyerowitz is an artist who regularly contributed to the Lampoon for fifteen years. His new book, celebrating the magazine and the people behind it, is called Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great.
Amy Sedaris, America's most delightfully unconventional hostess, talks about the joys of crafting. Her new book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People shows that crafting is pleasurable and constructive. It includes instructions for popular crafts and gifts: crab-claw clips, tinfoil balls, and crepe-paper moccasins, hints for getting inspired, and includes recipes for cooking your own edible crafts. She’ll also launch a listener craft contest!
[2010-10-12 13:00:00] Is disappointment the great leveler? Our guest this hour, writer, occasional actor and frequent This American Life contributor David Rakoff might think so, regardless of his success. We'll talk with him this hour about his latest book "Half Empty" (Doubleday, 2010).
Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal have both called P.J. O'Rourke "the funniest writer in America." With Election Day fast approaching, O'Rourke joins us to talk about his new book, "Don't Vote -- It Just Encourages the Bastards."
,” David Rakoff’s third essay collection, contains not only the warning “No Inspirational Life Lessons Will Be Found in These Pages,” but the guarantee that the author will have you “positively reveling in the power of negativity.” It’s never clear whether the pessimism alluded to is Rakoff’s philosophy, Rakoff’s device or Rakoff’s publicist clearing his throat. Luckily, we don’t have to judge this book by its cover. The inherent problem with most collections is that the reader can’t help comparing entries, like a track handicapper setting the morning line. In his ambitious opening essay, “The Bleak Shall Inherit,” an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of “The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Using Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety and Perform at Your Peak
”) sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow. They don’t all follow, and it doesn’t really matter, in the same way it doesn’t matter whether you buy a film’s premise that Diane Lane can’t get a date.
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