Quote of the Day

Stylemaker: Christian Louboutin

SHOE DESIGNER Christian Louboutin is a scavenger. During his constant globe-trotting adventures, he collects, well, everything: Egyptian sofas, English farm chairs, feathers from the Amazon, African masks, Brazilian mid-century anything, Damascene tiles and so on. He squirrels these away in a warehouse in Paris, which he visits regularly, like going to see old friends. When it’s time to decorate yet another residence—he has five now, in Paris, Portugal, Egypt, Los Angeles and the French countryside—he rummages through his treasures, looking for just the right pieces.

Louboutin, who is 48, knew he wanted to design shoes since he was a boy growing up in the 12th arrondissement in Paris. He doodled them in his books, ogled them at the Folies Bergère (where he worked as an intern) and boldly responded to any nosy adult who asked what he wanted to be: “A shoe designer!” When he received a book of legendary shoe man Roger Vivier’s work, Louboutin was bowled over: “How amazing,” he thought to himself. “You really can make a living designing shoes!” Louboutin dropped out of school at 16, traveled to Egypt and India, hung out at the famed Paris nightclub Le Palace and put together a portfolio of designs, which he took to various couture houses, looking for a job. He landed an entry-level spot at Charles Jourdan, which produced shoes for Dior. In 1988, he met Vivier and helped put together a retrospective of his work at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Louboutin so loved working for Vivier that once it was over he felt he could never work for anyone else except himself. He launched his company rather haphazardly in 1992, when his friend, the antiques dealer Eric Philippe, mentioned that a neighboring shop in the Passage Véro-Dodat was available for rent. Louboutin took the space, then designed and produced shoes to fill it. Two months in, a fashion writer was in the shop and overheard Princess Caroline of Monaco gushing about the shoes. After an article appeared mentioning this, Louboutin was on the fashion map.

“The thing I always try to remember is that feet are attached to the leg, and that you must prolong the silhouette,” he explains. “The shoe elongates the leg and does it discreetly.

 

Because homemade beats the drive thru — hands down

Some new ideas from the Brooklyn lunch counter Saltie:

The Clean Slate

Spread naan or pita with hummus.  Top with cooked quinoa; yogurt mixed with scallions and dill; sauerkraut; sliced pickled or roasted beets; shredded carrots; mixed fresh herbs of your choice, and sesame seeds.

The Scuttlebutt

Spread mayo mixed with smoked paprika on sliced foccacia, ciabatta, or a baquette.  Top with sliced hard boiled eggs; pitted, oil cured olives; capers; fresh herbs of choice; sliced pickled beets; and sliced radish.  Drizzle with olive oil and finish with feta.

The Little Chef

Spread green olive tapenade on crusty Italian bread or focaccia.  Top with mortadello, thinly sliced pecorino Toscano, fresh basil, and a drizzle of olive oil.

5 Ways to be Charming

It’s easier than we think.  Remember the 5 A’s:

Acceptance – The greatest gift we can give to other people is to accept them just as they are.  Never criticize or find fault.  Totally accept everything about them, as if they were a miracle of nature.  That is the starting point of being charming.

Appreciation – Say “thank you” on every occasion, for any large or small reason.  Make it a habit to thank everyone in the world for everything they do.

Approval – People who continually express approval are welcome everywhere they go.  We all need approval like we need food and rest.

Admiration – Compliment a person on an article of clothing.  Compliment someone on a trait,.  Compliment for small things as well as large things.  Always be looking for something to compliment.

Attention – Pay full attention to other people.  It is the key to instant charm.

Green Smoothies

I am addicted to this green smoothie.  From Bob Harper’s book The Skinny Rules, it has about 14 grams of fiber and only 340 calories and can be used as a meal replacement or sipped between meals as a snack.

Recipe

2 T protein powder

1 cup fresh kale

1 cup frozen spinach leaves

1/2 cup frozen pineapple

1/2 cup blueberries

1/2 small banana

Blend well and enjoy getting all your fruits & veggies in one sitting.

Quote of the Day

I saw this quote during my trip to Santa Fe and loved it.

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.

— Walsch

Jackson Hole, Wyoming

I just had my first visit to Jackson Hole and it is now one of my favorite destinations in the world.  The natural beauty is breathtaking … there are bike paths everywhere, including on the highways.  The art scene is vibrant with a focus on western art, but some of it is quite contemporary.  There are scads of jewelry designers and my favorite piece was from a designer called Katie Diamond, who shows her work in Jackson Hole.   There is quite a sophisticated dining scene.  My favorite experience was dinner at Jennie Lake Lodge, where the only option is a 5 course meal with wine.  Here’s the menu … my choices are highlighted in bold.

Starters

• Butter Poached Lobster Tail
• Creamy Grits with Leeks, Shiraz Reduction
• Bacon & Egg
• House Smoked Glazed Pork Belly, Corn Meal Waffle, Huckleberry Banana Syrup
• Squash Blossom Duo
• Duxelle Stuffed, Angel Hair Zucchini, Roasted Tomato Emulsion
• Organic Quinoa “ Baklava”
• Port Poached Anjou Pear, Caramelized Grapes

 Soups

• Roasted Parsnip
• Gremolata, Bacon Lardons
• Chef’s Daily Creation

 Salads

• Haricots Verts
• Heirloom Tomato, Herbs, Yogurt Dressing
• Jenny Lake Signature
• Organic greens, dried tart cherries, glazed pecans, caramelized red onion vinaigrette

 Entrées

• Champagne – Extra Virgin Olive Oil Poached Halibut
• Lemon Grass scented Basmati Rice, Edamame Pea Ragout Black Olive Oil Emulsion
• Free Range Chicken Roulade
• Sun Dried Tomato, Organic Spinach, Mozzarella, Prosciutto, Creamy Mascarpone Polenta, Chasseur Sauce
• Juniper Scented Venison Loin
• Jerusalem Artichoke Puree, Brussels Sprout Leaves, Bacon, Red Currant Sauce
• Apple Cider Guajillo Chili Wyoming Beef Short Rib
• Celeriac Puree, Wild Mushroom Jus Lie, Sweet Potato Chips

The best thing was that there was no Starbucks but 2 independent coffee shops, and no Barnes & Noble, but 2 independent bookstores.

Money and happiness

This is a long read but worth it!  HOW much money do you need to be happy? Think about it. What’s your number?

Many of us aren’t satisfied with how much we have now. That’s why we’re constantly angling for a raise at work, befriending aged relatives and springing, despite long odds, for lottery scratch tickets.

Is it crazy to question how much money you need to be happy? The notion that money can’t buy happiness has been around a long time — even before yoga came into vogue. But it turns out there is a measurable connection between income and happiness; not surprisingly, people with a comfortable living standard are happier than people living in poverty.

The catch is that additional income doesn’t buy us any additional happiness on a typical day once we reach that comfortable standard. The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

Why, then, do so many of us bother to work so hard long after we have reached an income level sufficient to make most of us happy? One reason is that our ideas about the relationship between money and happiness are misguided. In research we conducted with a national sample of Americans, people thought that their life satisfaction would double if they made $55,000 instead of $25,000: more than twice as much money, twice as much happiness. But our data showed that people who earned $55,000 were just 9 percent more satisfied than those making $25,000. Nine percent beats zero percent, but it’s still kind of a letdown when you were expecting a 100 percent return.

Interestingly, and usefully, it turns out that what we do with our money plays a far more important role than how much money we make. Imagine three people each win $1 million in the lottery. Suppose one person attempts to buy every single thing he has ever wanted; one puts it all in the bank and uses the money only sparingly, for special occasions; and one gives it all to charity. At the end of the year, they all would report an additional $1 million of income. Many of us would follow the first person’s strategy, but the latter two winners are likely to get the bigger happiness bang for their buck.

We usually think of having more money as allowing us to buy more and more of the stuff we like for ourselves, from bigger houses to fancier cars to better wine to more finely pixilated televisions. But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

Indulgence is often closely trailed by its chubby sidekick, overindulgence. While the concept of overindulgence is probably all too familiar to anyone who’s ever attended a Thanksgiving dinner, the word “underindulgence” doesn’t exist. (Type it into Dictionary.com, and you’ll be asked, “Did you mean counter intelligence?”) But research shows that underindulgence — indulging a little less than you usually do — holds one key to getting more happiness for your money.

In a recent study conducted by our student Jordi Quoidbach, chocolate lovers ate a piece of this confection — and then pledged to abstain from chocolate for one week. Another group pledged to eat as much chocolate as they comfortably could and were even given a mammoth two-pound bag of chocolate to help them meet this “goal.”

If you love chocolate, you might think that the students who absconded with the chocolaty loot had it made. But they paid a price. When they returned the next week for another chocolate tasting, they enjoyed that chocolate much less than they had the week before. The only people who enjoyed the chocolate as much the second week as they had the first? Those who had given it up in between. Underindulging — temporarily giving up chocolate, even when we have the cash to buy all we want — can renew our enjoyment of the things we love.

The value of underindulgence casts a different light on the current debate over restricting sugary sodas. Driven by the childhood-obesity crisis, many school districts around the country have banished soda from their campuses. Leaving aside the potential health benefits of these initiatives, banning soda for a large chunk of the day may actually improve its taste. Researchers at Arizona State University demonstrated that people enjoy soda significantly more when they can’t have it right away. (The effect doesn’t hold for prune juice, a beverage that rarely incites overindulgence.)

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s recent proposal to ban giant-size soda in New York City offers another intriguing route to underindulgence. Happiness research shows that, as the food writer Michael Pollan put it, “The banquet is in the first bite.” That first sip of soda really is delicious, catching our tongues by surprise with its bubbly sweetness. But our tongues and our minds quickly get used to repeated pleasures, and so the 39th sip is not as delightful as the first. Because limiting the size of sodas curtails these less pleasurable sips, Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal may improve our pleasure-to-calorie (and pleasure-to-coin) ratio, an overlooked benefit in the heated debate about the consequences of such initiatives for our freedom and our health.

USING your money to promote underindulgence requires a shift in behavior, for sure. But another scientifically validated means of increasing the happiness you get from your money is even more radical: not using it on yourself at all.

Imagine walking down the street to work and being approached by our student Lara Aknin, who hands you an envelope. You open the envelope and find $20 and a slip of paper, which tells you to spend the cash on something for yourself by the end of the day. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Now imagine instead that the slip of paper told you to spend the cash on someone else. Being generous is nice, sure, but would using the money to benefit someone else actually make you happier than buying yourself the belt, DVD or apps you’ve been dying to get?

Yes, and it’s not even close. When we follow up with people who receive cash from us, those whom we told to spend on others report greater happiness than those told to spend on themselves. And in countries from Canada to India to South Africa, we find that people are happier when they spend money on others rather than on themselves.

But what about individuals who are notorious for their struggles with sharing? Surely the emotional benefits of giving couldn’t possibly apply to very young children, who cling to their possessions as though their lives depended on it. To find out, we teamed up with the developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin and gave toddlers the baby-equivalent of gold: goldfish crackers. Judging from their beaming faces, they were pretty happy about this windfall. But something made them even happier. They were happiest of all when giving some of their treats away to their new friend, a puppet named Monkey. Monkey puppets aside, the lesson is clear: maximizing our happiness is not about maximizing our goldfish. To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness — those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got — which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

New app – Stitcher

From the WSJ:

I love podcasts, so this app really appeals to me.

Check out Smart Station, a new feature in an app called Stitcher, that aims to simplify the hunt for great podcasts. Smart Station fills a station with audio content on a variety of topics that it thinks you’ll like, finding this content using an algorithm that compares your listening patterns with tens of millions of listening hours from other users. It is designed to improve as you listen to more podcasts.

StitcherThe Smart Station feature on the Stitcher app uses an algorithm to help listeners discover new sources of audio podcasts that they might like.

The Stitcher app is free and runs onApple‘s AAPL +2.63% iPod touch, iPhone and iPad, as well as on Android phones and tablets, Barnes & Noble‘sBKS +7.93% Nook Color and Nook Tablet and Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It provides an elegant interface for finding and playing some 100,000 hours of podcast programming. But the app, alone, wasn’t doing a good enough job of helping users discover content they might like.

The Smart Station feature is a delight to use. I listened to podcasts it suggested while I was commuting, exercising and cooking in my kitchen. As promised, the content in my Smart Station seemed to get more personalized the more I used it. Each podcast in the curated list lasted about 30 minutes, more to chew on than three-minute news clips.

Other recent additions to Stitcher are a sleep timer, as well as a feature that shows podcast-representative album art on your device’s lock screen.

Meanwhile, Apple just released a standalone Podcasts app with a Top Stations feature.

My Smart Station took days to start working rather than the required minimum listening time of five minutes. Noah Shanok, Stitcher co-founder and chief executive, said this was due to a significant server outage soon after the release of this new version of Stitcher; the outage has since been fixed. Currently, the only way to manually adjust content added to your Smart Station is to start playing it and give each podcast a thumbs-up or -down, which will add more or delete similar content, respectively. Mr. Shanok said a future version of Smart Station will let people vote content up or down without playing it first.

Stitcher first-timers can choose up to three topics of interest from categories such as current events, liberal or conservative politics, tech, entertainment, and lectures and education. Or they can type a topic or radio station into a blank search box.

I tested Stitcher using an HTC One S Android phone, an iPad and an iPhone. One of the app’s coolest features is its seamless cloud synchronization. This means that if you use your iPad to listen to a Jeff Daniels interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, pause it and then want to restart it later while standing in line at the post office with your Android smartphone, “Fresh Air” will play from exactly where you left off on the iPad. Just don’t forget your earbuds.

If you find a podcast you like, hit the thumbs-up button to tell the app and improve the Smart Station algorithm. If you tap the star icon to add that show to your list of Favorites, new podcast episodes will fill up Favorites whenever they’re available. You can share any podcast episode with friends via Facebook, FB -0.85% Twitter or email. If you do nothing while listening, Smart Station still knows what you’ve listened to, how far you’ve listened and when you stopped so it can tell whether or not to suggest similar content in the future.

I used Smart Station to discover the shows Freakonomics Radio and Moth, and found NPR favorites, like Car Talk, as well as some I didn’t know existed, like NPR’s Most-Emailed Stories Podcast. I learned a lot by listening to a podcast called Stuff You Should Know, made by Discovery Communications’ How Stuff Works. A podcast episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class taught me the fascinating history of John James Audubon.

Stitcher’s Front Page is a section of the app divided into In the Headlines, What’s Hot and What’s New. Another section of On Demand Shows lets people search podcasts by interest, such as Games & Hobbies, Local and Spirituality & Religion. A Live Radio section lets you hear what’s playing through normal radio stations, but I preferred podcasts. Smart Station is located in the My Favorites section of the app.

Stitcher’s new sleep timer offers seven options ranging in length from 15 to 120 minutes. And its lock-screen album art came in handy once or twice when I wanted to know the name of the podcast I was hearing in a quick glance.

If you’re already a fan of talk radio or you’re curious about what kinds of programs are available in free podcasts but don’t know where to begin, Stitcher’s Smart Station will almost surely surface several shows that will pique your interest.

How to start a movement

This is one of the funniest videos I have seen in a long time – it also has a great message!

http://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement.html