Cultural - Leisure
“I’m doing that a lot more,” he says, adding that the people he manages seem to like it. “I’ve gotten direct feedback where they’ve thanked me for being clear.” GOOGLE executives say they aren’t crunching all this data to develop some algorithm of successful management. The point, they say, is to provide the data and to make people aware of it, so that managers can understand what works and, just as important, what doesn’t.
Google’s 8-Point Plan to Help Managers Improve
Joshua Foer. Marco Grob for The New York Times to the page, goes a long way toward explaining the unexpected spot in which I found myself in the spring of 2006.
Secrets of a Mind-Gamer
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The two annual TED conferences, on the North American West Coast and in Edinburgh, Scotland, bring together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes or less). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free . More than 1400 TED Talks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license , so they can be freely shared and reposted. Our mission: Spreading ideas.
One film did receive an NC-17 last year, if only fleetingly: “Blue Valentine,” a bruising independent drama about a marriage that goes south starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. The scarlet letters were for what was vaguely described as “explicit sexual content,” words interpreted to mean that the ratings board had freaked out at the realism or perhaps intimacy of the sex, including an instance of oral sex and another scene in which the unhappy couple make uncomfortable, crushingly sad love. The movie’s combative distributor, Harvey Weinstein, successfully appealed the NC-17, and the rating was changed, without cuts, to an R (for its “strong graphic sexual content, language and a beating.”)
Whatever Happened to Sex in Movies? - Critics Notebook
Luke White With Valentine’s Day around the corner, this seems the proper moment to ask whether being in a relationship changes how you exercise and, perhaps even more intriguing, whether relationships affect how exercise changes you. That latter possibility was memorably raised i n an elegant series of experiments conducted not long ago at Princeton University. The researchers were trying to replicate earlier work in which the brains of mice given free access to running wheels subsequently fizzed with new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis, and the mice performed better on rodent intelligence tests than those without access to wheels. To the Princeton researchers’ surprise, when they performed the same study with rats, “which are a little closer, physiologically, to humans,” said Alexis Stranahan, the lead author of the Princeton study, running did not lead to neurogenesis.
Phys Ed: Does Loneliness Reduce the Benefits of Exercise?
Illustration: Marcos Chin In February 2010, Jane McGonigal completed another level in her quest to become America's new guru of gaming.
Wii Shall Overcome
Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times Matthew Knowles on a treadmill in Dallas. Solo exercisers pose a challenge to many gyms.
Full-Service Gyms Feel a Bit Flabby - Skin Deep
Wine critic Mike Steinberger tries a '47 Petrus in awkward company. - By Mike Steinberger
I published a lengthy investigative piece last June about the fraud scandal roiling the fine-wine world. At the center of the story was a New York-based retailer called Royal Wine Merchants , which appeared to have served as a conduit for Hardy Rodenstock, a German pop-music-promoter-turned-wine dealer who is suspected of flooding the market with counterfeit old Bordeaux. Focusing on one wine in particular, the 1921 Château Pétrus, the piece documented the links between Rodenstock and Royal and also showed how the allegations against Royal dragged the critic Robert Parker into the controversy. (For an update on the major players mentioned in the June article, click .)
Blue Valentine, with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, reviewed. - By Dana Stevens
Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine Within the first 15 minutes of Derek Cianfrance's wrenching romantic drama Blue Valentine (the Weinstein Co.), you know more about the intimate, day-to-day details of its characters' lives than you do by the end of most movies. Cindy and Dean (Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling) are a married couple in their late 20s or early 30s. They live in rural Pennsylvania with a daughter of about 5 (Faith Wladyka).