By: The Film Experience

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t had the chance to see the earlier movies yet – pleasechange that as soon as possible, I beg you – or to get series veterans riled up for its imminent return (like that’s even necessary), I wanted to share five reasons that, for me, the first two Before… movies are some of the finest romantic dramas in the history of cinema.

The characters are real, and precise. 
Unless you’re paying attention to the cover of Jesse’s book in one scene of Sunset, neither of these characters have a last name, which is almost always fiction-code for “they are Everyperson stand-ins for the human experience”, and typically means that they’ll be a bit foggy in the expression. Nothing could be less true of either Celine or Jesse, both of whom are built with a basketful of specific character traits, whether it’s their fully fleshed-out back stories and current activities (e.g. Celine’s fond relationship with her grandmother and political engagement), or behavior that happens so naturally it doesn’t even seem like acting (e.g. Jesse’s habit of backtracking with a giggle every time he says something that Celine disapproves of), or even something as simple as patterns of speaking (e.g. the idiosyncratic use of “officially” in both films). And, obviously enough, it’s because they’re so exact and specific that they’re so appealing and easy to relate to; any time a writer wants to create a blank, universal situation, all they really do is make character who seem vague; because Jesse and Celine are so impeccable in every detail, it’s easier to think of their situation as applicable to real people and not just a concept.

The characters aren’t idealized. 
This is maybe contained within the last point, but important enough to pull it out on its own. If there’s one problem with modern romantic movies that makes all of them a bit tedious, it’s that the protagonists are too squeaky-clean, with their flaws depicted as charming quirks that anybody would love to be around, not irritations that a lover has to learn to understand and overlook. Celine and Jesse are, by and large, awfully pleasant and easy to like, but neither of them is a cardboard saint. Jesse is a bit preening and cocksure in Sunrise, after the fashion of every crisply-dressed jackass you wanted to punch in a bar, and he’s openly romanticizing the idea of cheating on his wife in Sunset. In both movies, Celine is intensely married to her opinions and takes obvious, if subdued delight in declaring those opinions loudly and forcefully enough that she makes her partner feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. They’re both prone to self-deception, and it’s pretty clear that they’re both a bit self-righteous. None of this is meant to make us dislike them, but it’s certainly enough to raise the question of whether they’d be a bit frustrating in real life. Of course they would, and it’s by allowing the romantic leads to have some dark shading that the films can suggest even more that they’re pretty realistic.

The films have a tremendous sense of place. 
To a great degree, Sunrise is about knocking around Vienna, poking into corners and sightseeing, and doing it with somebody you have fun spending time with. And just as much, Sunset is about not paying any attention to the sights of Paris as you’re walking around with somebody that you need, desperately, to reconnect with. So the relationship each film has to the city it takes place is very different, yet both of them succeed in capturing something very important about the feeling and texture of that city: without ever once having to rely on postcard-friendly shots of buildings and landscapes, the films act as the best possible advertisements for the cities by depicting them as alive and moving, full of little details that add to the texture and depth of the films whether the protagonists are engaging with the city, or ignoring it.

The craftsmanship is deliberate and precise without being overwhelming. 
Richard Linklater has had his ups and downs as a director, but the Before films are pretty clearly his masterpieces. Not because you can see him working for it, though. In fact, the guiding hand behind the movies is so quiet as to be completely invisible, particularly in Sunset, which is made up almost entirely of two-shots facing the characters. This simplicity isn’t the same as carelessness, though; what Linklater’s camera does here is to strip out everything that would be a distraction from the characters and the actors. It’s not the same as “getting out of the way”, as we sometimes dismissively say of direction that bows down in favor of letting the actors go on in bland long takes (think of any of Woody Allen’s sub-par films); it’s clearing the way, using some awfully complex and ambitious tracking shots (in Sunset), or very carefully-framed shots (in both films) not to draw attention to the cinematography, but to draw attention to the characters. It’s invisible filmmaking without which the films wouldn’t have nearly the impact they do, for the randomness of just filming actors is nothing like the deliberate care of foregrounding the actors without being showy.

The movies leave us wanting more. 
The ending of Sunrise, with Celine and Jesse romantically committing the kind of abject stupidity that could only be mistaken for wisdom by the young and intellectual. The exhilarating ellipsis as Sunset draws to a close with its legendary “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane” / “I know”. The films have so far performed the most dramatic kind of balancing act of convincing us of the emotions in the central relationship, and then refraining from paying that relationship off as most films would. Instead of being frustrating, this ends up being the most exciting and involving part of all, creating the sense that the characters have lives going on beyond the edges of the movie, and that makes our novennial reunions with these characters all the more inviting. I don’t know if Before Midnight will have a similar note of deliberate incompleteness in its closing moments, but based on the films so far, I expect to be just as invested in the lives of Celine and Jesse in 2022 as I am here in 2013.

++ Date:2007-02-15, 9:08AM PST — Advice to Young Men from an Old Man ++

1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.

2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time

3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.

4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.

5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests.

6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent’s intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.

7. Don’t be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don’t be a “conservative”. They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they’re perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you’ll see what I mean.

8. Don’t take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don’t want to come off as cynical.

9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit.

10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.

11. As a young man, you’re on your own. Society divides and conquers. Unlike women who have advocates looking out for them (NOW, Women’s Study Departments, government, non-profit organizations, political advocacy groups) almost no one is looking out for you.

12. Young men provide the genius and muscle by which our society thrives. Look at the Silicone Valley. By in large, it was not old men or women that created the revolution we live. Realize that society steals your contributions, secures it with our intellectual property laws, and then takes credit and the rewards where none is due.

13. Know that few people have your best interests at heart. Your mother does. Your father probably does (if he stuck around). Your siblings are on your side. Everybody else worries about themselves.

14. Don’t be afraid to tell people to “fuck off” when need be. It is an important skill to acquire. As they say, speak your piece, even if your voice shakes.

15. Acquire empathy, good interpersonal skills, and confidence. Learn to read body language and non-verbal communication. Don’t just concentrate on your vocational or technical skills, or you’ll find your wife fucking somebody else.

16. Keep fit.

17. Don’t speak ill of your wife/girlfriend. Back her up against the world, even if she is wrong. She should know that you have her back. When she needs your help, give it. She should know that you’ll take her part.

18. Don’t cheat on your wife/girlfriend. If you must cheat, don’t humiliate her. Don’t risk having your transgressions come back to her or her friends. Don’t do it where you live. Don’t do it with people in your social circle. Don’t shit in your own back yard.

19. If your girlfriend doesn’t make you feel good about yourself and bring joy to your life, fire her. That’s what girlfriends are for.

20. Don’t bother with “emotional affairs”. They are just a vehicle for women to flirt and have someone make them feel good about themselves. That’s the part of a relationship they want. For you it is a lot of work and investment in time. If they are having an emotional affair with you, they’re probably fucking someone else.

21. Becoming a woman’s friend and confidant is not going to get you into an intimate relationship. If you haven’t gotten the girl within a reasonably short period of time, chances are you won’t ever get her. She’ll end up confiding to you about the sexual adventures she’s having with someone else.

22. Have and nurture friendships with women.

23. Realize that love is a numbers game. Guys fall in love easily. You’re going to see some girl and feel like you’ll die if you don’t get her. If she rejects you, move on to the next one. It’s her loss.

24. Don’t be an internet troll. Got out and live life. There is not a cadre of beautiful women advertising on Craigslist to have NSA sex with you. Beautiful women don’t need to advertise. The websites that advertise with attractive women’s photos and claims of loneliness are baloney. All they want is your money and your personal information so that they can market to you. The posts on Craigslist by young “women” seeking NSA sex, and asking for a picture are just a bunch of gay troll pic collectors. This is especially true if the post uses common gay lexicon like “hole” as in “fuck my hole” or seeks “masculine” men, or uses the word cock (except in the context of “Don’t send a cock shot.”) There are women on Craigslist. They are easily recognizable by their 2-5 paragraph postings. Most are in their 30′s or older.

25. When you become a man in full, know that people will get in your way. People who are attracted to you will somehow manage to step in your path. Gay guys will give you “the look”. Old people will somehow stumble in front of you at the worst time. Don’t get frustrated. Just step aside and go about your business. Know that these are passive aggressive methods to get you to acknowledge their existence.

26. Don’t gay bash. Don’t mentally or physically abuse people because of who they are, or how they present themselves. It’s none of your business to try to intimidate people into conformity.

27. If your gay, admit it to yourself, your parents, your friends and society at large. Be prepared to get harassed. See rule 14. If someone threatens you or assaults you, call the cops. Have them arrested. You have no obligation to self sacrifice because of who you are. As a gay person, you’ll have more social freedom than straight men. Use it to protect yourself. Be prepared to get out of Dodge if your orientation makes your life unbearable. Move to San Francisco, New York, Atlanta, or New Orleans. You’ll find a welcoming community there.

28. Don’t be a poser. Avoid being one of those dudes who puts a surfboard on top of their car, but never surfs, or a dude with a powder coated fixed gear bike and a messenger bag, but was never a messenger. Live the life. Earn your bonafides.

29. Don’t believe the crap about the patriarchy. More women are accepted and attend college. More degrees are awarded to women than men. Women outlive men. More men commit suicide. Men are twice as likely to be victims of violence, including murder. If you consider sexual assaults in prisons, twice as many men are raped as women (society thinks prison rape is funny). The streets are littered with homeless men, sprinkled with a few homeless women. Statically,women are happier than men. The myth that girls are being cheated by our educational system is belied by the fact that schools are bastions of femininity, mostly run by and taught by women. Girls outperform boys in school. It is the boys in school getting fucked over, and prescribed Ritalin for being boys. Real wages for men are falling, while real wages for women are rising. Just because someone says something enough times, doesn’t make it true. You have nothing to feel guilty about.

30. Remember, 97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.

By: Bronnie Ware

For many years I worked in palliative care. My patients were those who had gone home to die. Some incredibly special times were shared. I was with them for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives.

People grow a lot when they are faced with their own mortality. I learnt never to underestimate someone’s capacity for growth. Some changes were phenomenal. Each experienced a variety of emotions, as expected, denial, fear, anger, remorse, more denial and eventually acceptance. Every single patient found their peace before they departed though, every one of them. 

When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. Here are the most common five: 

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. 

This was the most common regret of all. When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. 

It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way. From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late. Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard. 

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence. 

By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle. 

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming. Many developed illnesses relating to the bitterness and resentment they carried as a result. 

We cannot control the reactions of others. However, although people may initially react when you change the way you are by speaking honestly, in the end it raises the relationship to a whole new and healthier level. Either that or it releases the unhealthy relationship from your life. Either way, you win. 

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. 

Often they would not truly realise the full benefits of old friends until their dying weeks and it was not always possible to track them down. Many had become so caught up in their own lives that they had let golden friendships slip by over the years. There were many deep regrets about not giving friendships the time and effort that they deserved. Everyone misses their friends when they are dying. 

It is common for anyone in a busy lifestyle to let friendships slip. But when you are faced with your approaching death, the physical details of life fall away. People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible. But it is not money or status that holds the true importance for them. They want to get things in order more for the benefit of those they love. Usually though, they are too ill and weary to ever manage this task. It is all comes down to love and relationships in the end. That is all that remains in the final weeks, love and relationships. 

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier. 

This is a surprisingly common one. Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice. They had stayed stuck in old patterns and habits. The so-called ‘comfort’ of familiarity overflowed into their emotions, as well as their physical lives. Fear of change had them pretending to others, and to their selves, that they were content. When deep within, they longed to laugh properly and have silliness in their life again. 

When you are on your deathbed, what others think of you is a long way from your mind. How wonderful to be able to let go and smile again, long before you are dying. 

Life is a choice. It is YOUR life. Choose consciously, choose wisely, choose honestly. Choose happiness.

By: Aida Makoto

1. Never repeat the same—or even similar—thing twice. A genius artist need to have a mind and spirit so fresh that they seem to be suffering from repeated amnesia every single second.

2. Just like how your own past doesn’t matter much, the history of the human race is equally unimportant.

3. Artists have no concept of schedules and deadlines.

4. As far as being able to speak English goes, you should work towards a point where you can handle a banal everyday conversation while still doubting your own linguistic talents. If you really want to while away the hours speaking a language other than your own, choose something more interesting — ancient Sumerian, or dog talk.

5. You don’t need a passport. If you feel like it, go ahead and welcome the guests who come to you, but it’s inconceivable that you would become a “guest” yourself.

6. Stay away from money. If you touch it with your fingers, your soul will start to rot.

7. Even if you get to meet the power players, big shot collectors, curators, galleries and critics, forget about them right away. The next time you meet them, say “Eh? What’s your name again?” Even better, go ahead and punch them for no reason whatsoever.

8. Keep taking all sorts of drugs, stimulants, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, whatever you like, including harmful mind-altering and psychotropic substances. It is nonsense to filter those substances through your liver, too, so go ahead and have that useless organ removed beforehand.

9. It’s good to have passionate affairs and duels on a regular basis.

10. Don’t work. Don’t make anything.

By Gideon Lichfield
Quartz: December 29, 2012

Google published its annual Zeitgeist survey a couple of weeks ago, which tracks the year’s most popular searches in different countries. It breaks them down by category—people, movies, shopping, etc.—and for most countries, one of the categories is “How to…?” We took the top result for each country that had this category and translated them where necessary. (In a couple of cases, we weeded out spurious results caused by quirks of language.)

There’s some interesting variation. The most pressing challenges for many nationalities are kissing or slimming, but the Japanese are evidently obsessed with making their cellphones last longer, Colombians with cupcakes, and Russians with not being quite so mean to each other.

Most popular Google searches beginning “How to…”

Argentina: how to update Facebook
Australia: how to love
Brazil: how to remove Facebook
Canada: how to rock
Chile: how to make a family tree
Colombia: how to make cupcakes
Czech Republic: how to lose weight
Denmark: how to kiss
Finland: how to get a fever [for the purposes of sick leave]
France: how to lose weight
Hungary: how to kiss
Ireland: how to draw
Israel: how to make money
Italy: how to have sex
Japan: how to save [battery] power
Kenya: how to abort
Mexico: how to vote
Netherlands: how to survive
New Zealand: how to screenshot
Nigeria: how to love
Norway: how to write
Poland: how to delete Facebook
Portugal: how to lose weight
Romanian: how to kiss
Russian: how to become nicer
Senegal: how to address an envelope
Singapore: how to rock
Slovakia: how to pick up babes [i.e., women]
South Africa: how to kiss
Spain: how to install WhatsApp
Sweden: how to make out [i.e., kiss]
Ukrainian: how to lose weight
United Kingdom: how to draw
United States: how to love

WITHIN 20 YEARS…
Self-driving cars will hit the mainstream market. 
Battles will be waged without direct human participation (think robots or unmanned aerial vehicles). 
The first fully functional brain-controlled bionic limb will arrive. 

WITHIN 30 YEARS…
All-purpose robots will help us with household chores. 
Space travel will become as affordable as a round-the-world plane ticket. 
Soldiers will use exoskeletons to enhance battlefield performance. 

WITHIN 40 YEARS…
Nanobots will perform medical procedures inside our bodies. 

WITHIN 50 YEARS…
We will have a colony on Mars. 
Doctors will successfully transplant a lab-grown human heart.
We will fly the friendly skies without pilots onboard.
And renewable energy sources will surpass fossil fuels in electricity generation. 

WITHIN 60 YEARS… 
Digital data (texts, songs, etc.) will be zapped directly into our brains. 
We will activate the first fusion power plant. 
And we will wage the first battle in space. 

WITHIN 100 YEARS…
The last gasoline-powered car will come off the assembly line. 

By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

Rule 1: Think of the economy as being more like a cat than a washing machine.

We are victims of the post-Enlightenment view that the world functions like a sophisticated machine, to be understood like a textbook engineering problem and run by wonks. In other words, like a home appliance, not like the human body. If this were so, our institutions would have no self-healing properties and would need someone to run and micromanage them, to protect their safety, because they cannot survive on their own.

By contrast, natural or organic systems are antifragile: They need some dose of disorder in order to develop. Deprive your bones of stress and they become brittle. This denial of the antifragility of living or complex systems is the costliest mistake that we have made in modern times. Stifling natural fluctuations masks real problems, causing the explosions to be both delayed and more intense when they do take place. As with the flammable material accumulating on the forest floor in the absence of forest fires, problems hide in the absence of stressors, and the resulting cumulative harm can take on tragic proportions.

And yet our economic policy makers have often aimed for maximum stability, even for eradicating the business cycle. “No more boom and bust,” as voiced by the U.K. Labor leader Gordon Brown, was the policy pursued by Alan Greenspan in order to “smooth” things out, thus micromanaging us into the current chaos. Mr. Greenspan kept trying to iron out economic fluctuations by injecting cheap money into the system, which eventually led to monstrous hidden leverage and real-estate bubbles. On this front there is now at least a glimmer of hope, in the U.K. rather than the U.S., alas: Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, has advocated the idea that central banks should intervene only when an economy is truly sick and should otherwise defer action.

Promoting antifragility doesn’t mean that government institutions should avoid intervention altogether. In fact, a key problem with overzealous intervention is that, by depleting resources, it often results in a failure to intervene in more urgent situations, like natural disasters. So in complex systems, we should limit government (and other) interventions to important matters: The state should be there for emergency-room surgery, not nanny-style maintenance and overmedication of the patient—and it should get better at the former.

In social policy, when we provide a safety net, it should be designed to help people take more entrepreneurial risks, not to turn them into dependents. This doesn’t mean that we should be callous to the underprivileged. In the long run, bailing out people is less harmful to the system than bailing out firms; we should have policies now that minimize the possibility of being forced to bail out firms in the future, with the moral hazard this entails.

Rule 2: Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.

Some businesses and political systems respond to stress better than others. The airline industry is set up in such a way as to make travel safer after every plane crash. A tragedy leads to the thorough examination and elimination of the cause of the problem. The same thing happens in the restaurant industry, where the quality of your next meal depends on the failure rate in the business—what kills some makes others stronger. Without the high failure rate in the restaurant business, you would be eating Soviet-style cafeteria food for your next meal out.

These industries are antifragile: The collective enterprise benefits from the fragility of the individual components, so nothing fails in vain. These businesses have properties similar to evolution in the natural world, with a well-functioning mechanism to benefit from evolutionary pressures, one error at a time.

By contrast, every bank failure weakens the financial system, which in its current form is irremediably fragile: Errors end up becoming large and threatening. A reformed financial system would eliminate this domino effect, allowing no systemic risk from individual failures. A good starting point would be reducing the amount of debt and leverage in the economy and turning to equity financing. A firm with highly leveraged debt has no room for error; it has to be extremely good at predicting future revenues (and black swans). And when one leveraged firm fails to meet its obligations, other borrowers who need to renew their loans suffer as the chastened lenders lose their appetite to extend credit. So debt tends to make failures spread through the system.

A firm with equity financing can survive drops in income, however. Consider the abrupt deflation of the technology bubble during 2000. Because technology firms were relying on equity rather than debt, their failures didn’t ripple out into the wider economy. Indeed, their failures helped to strengthen the technology sector.

Rule 3: Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.

Experts in business and government are always talking about economies of scale. They say that increasing the size of projects and institutions brings costs savings. But the “efficient,” when too large, isn’t so efficient. Size produces visible benefits but also hidden risks; it increases exposure to the probability of large losses. Projects of $100 million seem rational, but they tend to have much higher percentage overruns than projects of, say, $10 million. Great size in itself, when it exceeds a certain threshold, produces fragility and can eradicate all the gains from economies of scale. To see how large things can be fragile, consider the difference between an elephant and a mouse: The former breaks a leg at the slightest fall, while the latter is unharmed by a drop several multiples of its height. This explains why we have so many more mice than elephants.

So we need to distribute decisions and projects across as many units as possible, which reinforces the system by spreading errors across a wider range of sources. In fact, I have argued that government decentralization would help to lower public deficits. A large part of these deficits comes from underestimating the costs of projects, and such underestimates are more severe in large, top-down governments. Compare the success of the bottom-up mechanism of canton-based decision making in Switzerland to the failures of authoritarian regimes in Soviet Russia and Baathist Iraq and Syria.

Rule 4: Trial and error beats academic knowledge.

Things that are antifragile love randomness and uncertainty, which also means—crucially—that they can learn from errors. Tinkering by trial and error has traditionally played a larger role than directed science in Western invention and innovation. Indeed, advances in theoretical science have most often emerged from technological development, which is closely tied to entrepreneurship. Just think of the number of famous college dropouts in the computer industry.

But I don’t mean just any version of trial and error. There is a crucial requirement to achieve antifragility: The potential cost of errors needs to remain small; the potential gain should be large. It is the asymmetry between upside and downside that allows antifragile tinkering to benefit from disorder and uncertainty.

Perhaps because of the success of the Manhattan Project and the space program, we greatly overestimate the influence and importance of researchers and academics in technological advancement. These people write books and papers; tinkerers and engineers don’t, and are thus less visible. Consider Britain, whose historic rise during the Industrial Revolution came from tinkerers who gave us innovations like iron making, the steam engine and textile manufacturing. The great names of the golden years of English science were hobbyists, not academics: Charles Darwin, Henry Cavendish, William Parsons, the Rev. Thomas Bayes. Britain saw its decline when it switched to the model of bureaucracy-driven science.

America has emulated this earlier model, in the invention of everything from cybernetics to the pricing formulas for derivatives. They were developed by practitioners in trial-and-error mode, drawing continuous feedback from reality. To promote antifragility, we must recognize that there is an inverse relationship between the amount of formal education that a culture supports and its volume of trial-and-error by tinkering. Innovation doesn’t require theoretical instruction, what I like to compare to “lecturing birds on how to fly.”

Rule 5: Decision makers must have skin in the game.

At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don’t take personal risks. But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug. This has an excellent precedent in the practices of the ancients. The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.

Because our current system is so complex, it lacks elementary clarity: No regulator will know more about the hidden risks of an enterprise than the engineer who can hide exposures to rare events and be unharmed by their consequences. This rule would have saved us from the banking crisis, when bankers who loaded their balance sheets with exposures to small probability events collected bonuses during the quiet years and then transferred the harm to the taxpayer, keeping their own compensation.

In these five rules, I have sketched out only a few of the more obvious policy conclusions that we might draw from a proper appreciation of antifragility. But the significance of antifragility runs deeper. It is not just a useful heuristic for socioeconomic matters but a crucial property of life in general. Things that are antifragile only grow and improve under adversity. This dynamic can be seen not just in economic life but in the evolution of all things, from cuisine, urbanization and legal systems to our own existence as a species on this planet.

We all know that the stressors of exercise are necessary for good health, but people don’t translate this insight into other domains of physical and mental well-being. We also benefit, it turns out, from occasional and intermittent hunger, short-term protein deprivation, physical discomfort and exposure to extreme cold or heat. Newspapers discuss post-traumatic stress disorder, but nobody seems to account for post-traumatic growth. Walking on smooth surfaces with “comfortable” shoes injures our feet and back musculature: We need variations in terrain.

Modernity has been obsessed with comfort and cosmetic stability, but by making ourselves too comfortable and eliminating all volatility from our lives, we do to our bodies and souls what Mr. Greenspan did to the U.S. economy: We make them fragile. We must instead learn to gain from disorder.

I’ve been saying that college is obsolete for a very long time. I dropped out in 2000, because even back then I could see that it was a really poor value proposition. I didn’t predict this because I’m some crazy genius, but because I’m willing to discard emotional attachment and stare plainly at the facts.

School is oturageously expensive, leaving graduates with a debt (or net expenditure) of tens of thousands of dollars— sometimes even one or two hundred thousand. There are some things that are worth that amount of money, but for many people school isn’t one of them. In fact, apart from very specific cases, I think that school is a bad thing, not worth doing even if it was free.

That’s not to say that school has no benefits whatsoever. It does, and although I left with zero additional skills after my three semesters there, I had a good time and benefited from the social aspect. The problem is that you can’t just compare college to doing nothing at all. You have to compare it to what you COULD have done.

Let’s say that when you turn eighteen, it’s a good idea to take four years to develop yourself. College is one way to do that. If we were to construct an alternative way to do that, what could it look like? One of the biggest weaknesses of school is how inflexible it is, so one of the greatest benefits of designing your own curriculum is that you could come up with one that uniquely suits you. That said, here’s a plan that I think would benefit many people MORE than school would. Let’s call it the Hustler’s MBA.

1. Learn poker. To an outsider, poker seems like a form of degenerate gambling. It can be, but that’s not its nature. One of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in life is how to assess hundreds of factors, choose the important ones, evaluate them to make a decision quickly, and then execute that decision. Poker teaches this extremely well. So does pickup, incidentally. Poker develops your logic like nothing else I’ve experienced, and it develops your math skills to a lesser degree. It also teaches a skill I can’t quite define, but would best describe as learning how hard you can push. I’ve found all of these skills to be very useful in life.

Poker will cost you money at first. Let’s say $5000 in the first year. After that you’ll be able to make between $45-60 per hour for the rest of your life. That’s about $85,000 per year, which adjusts for inflation because as money is inflated, the stakes to keep the game interesting will go up. You will also receive “raises” because you’ll always improve as a player and be able to play better stakes. If you’re dedicated to poker, getting this good is virtually guaranteed. I’ve been through the process and it’s not particularly hard. Can school guarantee you a job that pays this well?

Besides being able to make $85k/year, you could also play for six months and make $40k a year. Ultimate flexibility. I don’t think that poker is the best career in the world, because it doesn’t give back to society, but I do think that it’s an excellent backup plan. Knowing that I can always support myself playing poker gives me the freedom to work on big projects without fear.

2. Travel a lot. For the first year, learn a foreign language that interests you. Start with three months of Pimsleur tapes, then get a local tutor. That should cost about $1000 for the first year, and will yield results FAR greater than a class in school. After the first year your self-education will be paid for by poker, so start traveling for three months every year. That should cost around $8k at the most, probably more like $5-6k. When traveling, education comes to you in the form of perspective. You understand other cultures and other people, and will get to practice your foreign language in its native setting. I would also combine travel with watching documentaries about the history of that place. I learned a lot about Rome after visiting, and now I’m kicking myself for not educating myself first.

3. Read every single day for at least an hour. Books get lumped in with other reading like magazines and blogs, but they’re actually far more valuable. The amount of value an author compresses into a book is often astounding. There are books I’ve paid $10 for that have completely changed my life. If you read for 1-2 hours on average, you’ll read around a hundred books per year. I do this now and find it to be one of the most valuable uses of my time. Read at least 50% non-fiction, but fiction is good, too. In school you would probably read 12 books a year at most.

4. Write every single day. Write blog posts, work on a book, write how you’re feeling, or write short stories. I don’t think it really matters. Writing every day helps you develop and refine your thoughts, as well as learn to communicate with others. Almost any field you’ll go into will require communication, so you may as well get good at it. After you write, record a video yourself explaining what you wrote. This will help with public speaking and conversation. After the first year at the very latest, start publicly posting your work. This teaches you to ship and to integrate feedback.

5. Learn to program, even if you don’t want to be a programmer. Programming develops logic and efficiency, amongst other things. Even an intermediate understanding of programming will allow you to be a creator. Programming languages are the languages of the future, so even if you aren’t a programmer yourself, there’s a good chance you’ll be working with them. Speaking someone’s language is nice when you’re working with them, right?

6. Do something social. College is really excellent for making people social, and it’s the one aspect in which don’t expect my plan to exceed school. If you’re a guy, consider getting into pickup. If you’re a human, take group art classes, yoga, dance, or go to meetup groups. Social skills are some of the most important skills you can learn, and they can only truly be developed through social interaction. This interaction has to be in person, too… online chatting can be beneficial, but it’s not enough. Traveling will help you be social as well, especially if you stay in hostels.

7. Eat healthy. When you eat healthy, your brain functions better and you’re safeguarding its longevity. Developing yourself is at least as much about good habits as it is about learning skills. And like all habits, the earlier you start, the better. I’d say that the minimum to shoot for here is cutting out all sweeteners and refined grains. Besidses the obvious health benefits, eating healthy will help you build discipline, which is an absolutely essential life skill.

8. Follow curiousity and spend money on it when necessary. These things that I’ve included so far are the baseline— the new liberal arts education. They leave you plenty of time in your day to follow whatever you’re interested in. Don’t force it and try to learn investment banking because you think it would make a good career. If you’re interested in butterflies, learn about butterflies. The rest of the curriculum is enough to make sure that you’ll always be able to provide for yourself and will be a well rounded person, so consider this section your speculative learning. Maybe you’ll find something you’re passionate about, which will become your career, or maybe you’ll just become a really interesting person who knows a lot about a lot of things. Either way is fine. Don’t be afraid to spend money on tutors, classes, equipment, seminars, or travel.

9. Start a business after two years. With a full two years of self-education under your belt, you should have something useful to contribute to society. School makes you go from sheltered learning mode straight into real-world career mode. I think a better way is to have a transition, and to couple productivity with learning. Having that habit will ensure that you continue to perfect your craft as you get older. Your business can be anything— a tech startup, publishing books you’ve written, giving speeches, making clothing and selling it online, whatever you’re into. Read some business books before starting it and try to make money. One of the most common complaints I hear from graduates of traditonal school is that nothing they learned was actually applicable to real ife. Everything you learn from starting a business IS.

This is a modern curriculum that, on average, will produce people better prepared for real life than college. Obviously, it won’t work if you want to be something that requires certification like a doctor or lawyer. The beauty of it is that it has a negative cost (you will make money due to poker, and hopefully your business), and can be funded initially with $5000 for poker. A few months into the second year, you will have paid off the poker debt and begun to self fund your life.

Will this work for you? There’s no guarantee, but I see people work pretty hard at school, and if that same effort were put towards the Hustler’s MBA, I thnk the chance of being self-sufficient and prepared for “real life” is about 90%. I’d estimate that non-laywer/doctor college is somewhere around 50-70%. So, like anything, this plan is not totally foolproof, but I think it’s a lot better and cheaper than the alternative.

There’s a big taboo around telling people not to go to college. I find myself adhering to it, not ever suggesting that younger members of my family should drop out or skip school entirely. But maybe the time has come for us to look at college objectively, really quantify what goes in and what comes out, and evaluate it on its merits alone, rather than its historical value or its societal aura.

itwonlast:

filmcomment: As ranked by our contributors, a list of the greatest films never made. The criteria for this survey is that the projects were all at one time planned or attempted by one or many directors. This is not a list of unproduced screenplays, but of unrealized productions. Any films that were ultimately made by another director have been discounted, hence the absence of Orson Welles’s The Big Brass Ring.

1. Heart of Darkness by Orson Welles

Adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella. The production began to fall apart when Welles took a long delay in getting the script out to his actors. In addition, the script was too long (at 184 pages) and with special effects work, miniatures, process and matte shots, and huge jungle sets, the film’s budget exceeded $1 million.

2. Genesis by Robert Bresson

A lavish adaptation of the Book of Genesis. Dino de Laurentiis had agreed to finance, but Bresson abandoned the project only to take it up again and then abandon it a second time. He once said that one of the frustrations with the production was that he couldn’t make his animal performers do as they were told.

3. Napoleon by Stanley Kubrick

A biopic on Napoleon set to be made just after the successes of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was so enthusiastic to make the project that he confessed to identifying with Bonaparte even down to the way he ate his food. Jack Nicholson was slated to play the title character, but when corporate changes hit MGM, Kubrick lost the approval.

4. An American Tragedy by Sergei Eisenstein

1930 Adaptation of Dreiser’s novel to be produced by Paramount. Selznick thought the script terribly moving, but too depressing for commercial success: “a subject that will appeal to our vanity through the critical acclaim…but that cannot possibly offer anything but a most miserable two hours to millions of happy-minded young Americans.”

5. Jesus by Carl Theodor Dreyer

Aimed to depict the historical Jesus (a human Jesus) and “to stamp out the myth that the Jewish people are to blame for Jesus’ death.”

6. The Adventures of Harry Dickson by Alain Resnais

Based on a 1931-40 crime series by Jean Ray: to star Dirk Bogarde or Laurence Olivier as the eponymous Harry Dickson with mostly British and American actors in the cast, including Vanessa Redgrave. Surrealist Andre Delvaux had signed on to design the sets and Stockhausen had agreed to pen the music.

7. I, Claudius by Joseph von Sternberg

Adaptation of the Robert Graves novel. The film was abandoned because of a serious car accident during production involving one of the actors.

8. Kaleidoscope by Alfred Hitchcock

After watching Antonioni’s Blow-Up, Hitchcock felt he was a century behind the Italians in technique. He asked the novelist Howard Fast to sketch a treatment about a gay, deformed serial killer. Pleased with the results, Hitchcock composed a shot list with over 450 camera positions and shot an hour’s worth of experimental color tests. However, MCA/Universal were disgusted by the script and immediately cancelled the project reducing Hitchcock to tears.

9. The Aryan Papers by Stanley Kubrick

Based on novel by Louis Begley Wartime Lies about the young son of a wealthy jewish family forced to flee when the Germans invade Poland. To shoot in Denmark. Cast to include Joseph Maziello of Jurassic Park, and Uma Thurman or Julia Roberts.

10. The Idiot by Andrei Tarkovsky

An adaptation of the Dostoevsky novel, but Tarkovsky died before it could be realized.

11. Leningrad: The 900 Days by Sergio Leone

Inspired by the “invasion theme” of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. Influenced by Times journalist Harrison Salisbury’s book 900 Days—the Siege of Leningrad. A story of doomed love between a cynical American newsreel cameraman and a young Soviet girl against the epic background of the siege (Leone: “think of Gone with the Wind”). Leone imagined Robert De Niro in the lead. Music by Ennio Morricone. To be shot in the USSR. Delayed indefinitely by Leone’s inability to commit his many ideas to paper and Soviet producers’ reluctance to grant permission.

12. The Moviegoer by Terrence Malick

Adaptation of Walker Percy novel.

13. À la recherche du temps perdu by Luchino Visconti

In 1969 Visconti commissioned a script by Suso Cecchi d’Amico. Visconti conducted rigorous research around Paris and the Normandy coast. The usual collaborators were retained: Nicole Stéphane, photographer Claude Schwartz, costume designer Piero Tosi, and set designer Mario Garbuglia. Silvana Mangano was to play Duchesse de Guermantes, Alain Delon or Dustin Hoffman the Narrator-Protagonist Marcel, and Helmut Berger Baron Charlus’s homosexual protégé Charlie Morel.—huge cast, huge budget, four hours long. Laurence Olivier or Marlon Brando considered for Charlus.

14. The Duchess of Langeais by Max Ophüls

The film, an adaptation of the Balzac novel, was meant to be a comeback vehicle for Greta Garbo. Screen tests were taken, but the film could not get financial backing and fell apart.

15. The Crusades by Paul Verhoeven

With a $150 million budget, Arnold Schwarzenegger was signed for the lead role. The film was to be produced by Carolco, who in the same year produced Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island. The company didn’t want to take a risk by doing two big-budget films at once, so Verhoeven made Showgirls instead while Cutthroat Island filmed. When Cutthroat Island flopped, Carolco went bankrupt and The Crusades never materialized.

16. The Cradle Will Rock by Orson Welles

Based on story of Welles’s 1937 production. John Landis and George Folsey to executive produce. Welles rewrote screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr. Rupert Everett to star as Welles.

17. À la recherche du temps perdu by Joseph Losey

In the Seventies Harold Pinter teamed up Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay.

18. Gershwin by Martin Scorsese

Paul Schrader wrote the script for this biopic about the American composer. It was intended that there would be lavish production numbers of Gershwin’s works that would be related to scenes from his life discussed by Gershwin on a psychologist’s couch. The project was cancelled due to complications with rights and the fear that a young audience would not understand or care about Gershwin.

19. The House of Bernarda Alba by Luis Buñuel

20. The Conquest of Mexico by Werner Herzog

From the perspective of the conquered Aztecs. He says the film would be so expensive that it could only be made with the backing of a Hollywood studio.