A new book, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, explores failure as a condition, a natural result of ordinariness. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post quotes from Scott Sandage’s book a passage so seemingly obvious it makes you wonder how no one before now has written this:

“Failure had become modern, a low hum rather than a loud crash. It meant a fragmented life, not necessarily a shattered one. Anyone could be a failure if that identity required utter stagnation instead of outright misfortune. By the time Mark Twain imagined Tom and Huck fading away ‘under the mold,’ the American idea of failure centered on problems recognizably our own: aimlessness, routine, stress, conformity, loss of individuality, the dead-end job, the disgrace of being ‘merely’ average. Losers plodded their lives away in offices, factories and boardrooms.”

Vinnee Tong

A whole slew of less-than-thrilling books have been written about writing. Many others have been written that belong to the category of writers on reading. Nick Hornby recently published one of these.

Of course, there has been an article written about the book that Mr. Hornby wrote about reading other books, or not reading them, as he readily admits and then writes about. (Read on for details about the book, titled The Polysyllabic Spree: A Hilarious and True Account of One Man’s Struggle With the Monthly Tide of the Books He’s Bought and the Books He’s Been Meaning to Read.)

Shockingly, the article by Carol Iaciofano in The Boston Globe actually made me want to buy the book. She writes, “But buying books is half the fun. For anyone who’s ever browsed around a bookstore, reading Hornby’s accounts of how one book led him to another, or how he discovered a new author nearly by accident, is like reconnecting with an erudite friend.”

Who knows, maybe I’ll buy the book — or even read it.

Vinnee Tong

Whenever the subject comes up, I obnoxiously like to say that I don’t believe in dieting. After reading an article published this week, I will need to revise my pronouncement to something like this: I don’t believe in diets. I believe in eating well.

A friend of mine writes in The New York Sun about a new book by Mireille Guiliano, French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating for Pleasure.

I haven’t yet read the book, but the story about it was a sort of a that’s-what-I-meant experience. An excerpt:

“Ms. Guiliano offers a wealth of gastronomic wisdom not only to defeat nos petits demons but to reawaken an individual, multi-sensory relationship to food as pleasure …

Ms. Guiliano is confident that through slowly ‘recasting’ and making minor adjustments American women can learn to think about what is good to eat instead of what we ‘can’t’ have …

French Women is not a book for anyone looking for a radical transformation, or a January 1 starting gun. The book’s true strength is to remind the dieting public that there are no quick fixes and that eating truly should be a source of real pleasure.”

Vinnee Tong

The BBC maintains a reporter’s log covering certain news events. This week, after the tsunamis in Asia, several reporters have been writing dispatches posted online.

A reporter in Phuket, Thailand, wrote that a German tourist, Winfred Parkinson, said the following:

“Everyone who wanted to take something out of their house must have died. The people who ran and did nothing else but running, only they had a chance.”

Another reporter, in Aceh, Indonesia, posted this:

“The true horror of what happened here Sunday morning is slowly being pieced together.”

Dead bodies, the stranded, the injured, the hopeless. As it sometimes happens, the true horror of real life has far surpassed the viciousness of any imaginary tragedies we may have encountered in our books, movies, and other forms of fake drama.

Vinnee Tong

Pankaj Mishra’s book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, is reviewed by Edward Skidelsky.

He writes, “Buddhism fills the vacuum created by the collapse of religious and political hopes. It is appropriate that it should find its home in California, a land fulfilling what Nietzsche specified as the preconditions of Buddhism: “ ‘a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and … it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home.’ The oldest of the world religions has, by a curious irony, proved itself the most adaptable to the end of history.”

Vinnee Tong

Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post writes about J.D. Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye, in this delayed criticism.

Of the book Mr. Yardley calls “the essential document of American adolescence,” he asks these questions: “Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as ‘a symbol of purity and sensitivity’ (as The Oxford Companion to American Literature puts it) when he’s merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?”

The above are not all answered satisfactorily, but the article does re-examine the merits of the book, one of the most influential ever in the modern world of American teenagers.

Vinnee Tong

For many, the Internet truly has come to feel as necessary as clocks or cell phones. This seems to be more so for young people acclimated to the amenities of the modern world. The Japanese already have a word for those who cloister themselves away from the world, only to interact with it through the Internet. They call them “hikikomori.”

Japanese police found two cars yesterday with nine people in all who are believed to have committed suicide. And they believe they met and coordinated their deaths online.

It’s a sad story, knowing that a group of young people, in their teens and early 20s, felt so hopeless that they carried out their deaths. Some critics of the Internet will say it’s dangerous, that it enables this kind of group self-killing. The organizers of a website where suicide is discussed say they offer a compassionate service to those who need it.

Maybe we shouldn’t blame the tools for the actions of the user. Still, maybe what’s missing is some human, tangible, offline compassion so the hikikomori around the world no longer choose to be stranded.

Vinnee Tong

There is a four-year-old girl in upstate New York who has painted and sold two dozen paintings and, from these sales, earned about $40,000. She’s had a gallery show in her hometown of Binghamton, and The New York Times reports that she has her critics and admirers. Putting the question of her popularity aside, consider for a moment that she even has critics and admirers. She is, after all, four years old.

Painting is one of those fields in which you imagine there are countless numbers of people toiling away while never really finding any recognition or satisfaction even. (Admittedly, that is a somewhat dour perspective.) So to see a four-year-old, a child who is in preschool, already considered a success sort of makes you either want to pull out your hair maybe, if you’re the self-pitying, aspiring-artist type, or makes you want to smile — at the oddity of a four-year-old who can make paintings that people find emotionally moving.

This young artist, Marla Olmstead, who did I mention is four, has a waiting list for her paintings, for which the going rate is now about $6,000. My favorite part of this story is when her mother talks about the money and Marla’s inability to understand what it means to have $40,000. Her mother said in the Times, “She has no concept of money. She was really into lip gloss, so I told her it was enough money to buy a whole room of lip gloss.”

You do understand she’s four years old, right?

Vinnee Tong

I like to tell people that I’m at that age, the age when so many people I know are getting married that my vacations now revolve around weddings. (As a friend of mine would say: That’s a first-world problem.) For everyone getting married, thinking of getting married or thinking about when they might have the chance to get married, I recommend the recently released film, We Don’t Live Here Anymore.

Caveat: I guess I recommend it not for those who want the feelings induced by a movie like, say, Father of the Bride, but to those who want to see an honest, emotional look at the common problems of some marriages. Because it’s been called among other things “an anatomy of adultery,” you can surmise that it’s not exactly an advertisement for the happier aspects of marriage.

The rewards of enduring some discomfort, though, are great. Outside of some dated attitudes (woman as stay-at-home mom and housekeeper), the movie is a heart-breaking look at guilt, exhaustion, ambition, and love. The short summary is that two couples sleep with each other (men with women). Both marriages lean precipitously toward being dissolved. At turns, you end up hating both the male characters, one of whom is played by Mark Ruffalo of another indie triumph, You Can Count on Me. But it’s the nuanced, complicated feelings the movie extracts from you that really make it worth seeing.

If you’re at that age, it’s as good a time as any.

Vinnee Tong

A story in The New York Times today puts into focus an interesting divide in the world of ambitious, young, would-be professionals. Jennifer 8. Lee writes about the growing divide between young people who can afford to take unpaid internships and those who can not.

As anyone who has actually applied for an internship can tell you, the ability to take an unpaid internship not only means there are a greater number of options but also that the options are more selective, prestigious ones. This is a story that should not be forgotten. As internships grow in importance for young people starting their careers, the impact of this internship disparity could be to make even wider any class divisions already created through elementary, secondary, and higher education.

Those of us rooting for meritocracy as an ideal can only hope that the persistence and endurance of the young, ambitious, and financially challenged can prevail over the exhaustion of long work weeks and the stress of making ends meet.

Vinnee Tong

Republican media manipulators effectively have dealt two hits to the Democratic image, just before and during this week’s convention in Boston, where the Johns have gone to “announce” their candidacy.

First came the news, days before the release of the long-awaited September 11 commission report, that Sandy Berger took commission documents that he shouldn’t have. The Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request that emphasized the lack of timeliness of the revelation; he posed the idea that Mr. Berger’s removal of documents had been known for months but stored up for a more opportune moment to make it public.

Then just yesterday, the Boston Herald reported that Teresa Heinz Kerry had called Ted Kennedy “a perfect bastard” in the mid-1970s. At the time, Mrs. Kerry was Mrs. Heinz, married to her first husband who was a Republican senator. Senator Kennedy’s office says that he and Mrs. Kerry, over the years, had developed a “deep friendship.” A lot can change in nearly three decades.

There’s nothing like trying to manipulate the media and nothing better than a public that can recognize it.

Vinnee Tong

Morgan Stanley settled a discrimination lawsuit yesterday. To avoid going to trial, the firm agreed to pay $54 million. Most of the money will go to 340 women who worked or still work for the institutional-stock division at the Wall Street securities company. The news seems good. But somehow, after reading it, you just can’t make up your mind to cheer for women’s rights.

The Wall Street Journal quotes Pamela Martens, a former employee who settled a different discrimination suit against Smith Barney six years ago. She said the $54 million was merely “pocket change” for a firm like Morgan Stanley. As to whether the settlement, which includes $2 million for outside monitoring of gender bias, will do anything to change the environment on Wall Street, Martens predicted it would do “absolutely nothing.”

Morgan’s chief executive, Philip Purcell, is reported to have personally called the Equal Employment Opportunity Chairwoman, Cari Dominguez, to work out the final settlement by midnight Sunday. The deal was reached almost four years after the lawsuit was first filed. The lead plaintiff, 43-year-old Allison Schieffelin, said, “I’m happy that there’s such a great settlement for everybody.” The EEOC’s lead attorney said she hoped the settlement would send a strong message to other Wall Street companies.

Please excuse the cynics among us, who might wonder whether the message may affect all that much. Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, said in The New York Times that the $54 million was “nothing” to a firm like Morgan Stanley. In last quarter alone, the firm earned more than $1 billion.

Probably the executives at Morgan were thinking less about the $54 million and more about the 20 or so witnesses who were scheduled to testify. Probably they were more concerned about a public airing of episodes in which employees supposedly ordered birthday cakes shaped like breasts and had strippers at work. Probably.

Vinnee Tong