Even before I left the accountant’s office, I knew I would never spend this money. The envelope would sit in my drawer of keepsakes, pristine and untouched. This was different from any money I had ever taken in my life. Different from the stipend I received as a teacher’s aide. Different from the check I received for my two day’s work as an accountant. Different from my monthly stack of 100 yuan bills from teaching. No, this money was special. This money was a symbol of the value of my ideas.

This realization suddenly made me want to listen to Nelly’s song “Ride Wit Me” from his debut album Country Grammar. There’s a line in it that I can relate to now: “It feel strange now / Makin’ a livin’ off my brain, instead of ‘caine now.” He’s talking about being able to earn money from writing rap instead of selling cocaine but if you replace “selling cocaine” with “teaching English” then that’s basically me.

Though I enjoy teaching English, my dream of being paid to write is slowly being realized. I sometimes despair of life but I’m writing this to remind myself in those despairing times that I’m pretty fucking fortunate. How many people aspiring writers can say they earn half a living from writing at 26?

As an aside, one commenter on the Beijinger‘s forums called me a loser. I think a year ago I would have gotten angry and butthurt but now I pity such people. How pathetic does one have to be to go out of their way to try and tear down someone else’s achievement when they most likely have never created anything of value themselves?

I used to be one of these people, so I know a hater when I see one. Which suddenly makes me want to listen to Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player” from his debut album Capital Punishment. “I’m still not a player but you still a hater.” If you replace “player” with “writer” then that’s basically me.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman talks about two systems that govern our thinking. System 1 is what we’d commonly call our intuition, our immediate reaction to a situation; System 2 is what we’d call our reason, our ability to reach a conclusion that is non-intuitive. System 1 is fast and automatic; System 2 is slow and deliberative. Using System 2 to reach conclusions requires mental work and prolonged usage wears us out. You can guess where this is going.

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieveing the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

So if people are lazy (i.e. averse to expending energy) by nature, and using reason requires work, then it’s no surprise most people choose not to use it. Kahneman says that a recurrent theme throughout the book is:

Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions. They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.

Is it any wonder then that people prefer superstition, easy diets, 10-step programs and self-help books to the hard work of self-reflection and change? No, not really.

“No way,” I thought. But sure enough, someone had created a 3D SimCity replica of Beijing. Below is a screenshot of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen.

Of course, not everything is exact. Beijing doesn’t end at the third ring road and the water is not quite as cyan as the map would have you believe. Below is a screenshot of my apartment complex. Though the number of stories is a little off, the color and layout are spot on.

It’s been about 15 years since gangsta rap degraded into the bland mash of braggadocio, materialism, and promiscuity that we call rap, and yet, 15 years on, audiences still aren’t tired of it. It seems as long as money, jewelry, and loose women exist, we will have unimaginative rap music.

That is why I support any attempt to satirize this genre, or really any genre of music. By laying bare the overused tropes and tiresome themes of their targets, these parodies, at their best, force artists to innovate or be reduced to a punch line. Weird Al Yankovic and The Lonely Island are the most successful examples of this kind of satire, but they are far from alone.

Just a few days ago, a friend sent me a link to this video (thanks Sid!):

It’s so pitch-perfect I couldn’t tell if it was a joke or not. Turns out, these guys have an entire album of satires based on 90s R&B entitled Keep the Jeep Ridin’. The songs are not terribly well-produced but their comedy timing is unimpeachable. What’s more, most of the songs have a hilarious music video. (View them all here.) From the canted angles, retro dance moves, and frantic green screen zooming, you’ll be having MTV Jamz flashbacks.

Some of the most outrageous and brilliant lyrics are featured in “Lemme Smang It,” “Fried or Fertilized,” and, off their upcoming album, “Why I Gotta Wait??”

There’s not a lot of info on these guys but here’s an interview with my new favorite rapper, Flynt Flossy.

In contrast to plain optimism, the unrealistic kind characterizes people who continue to believe there will be a rosy outcome despite clear evidence and even personal experience to the contrary. While reasonable optimism serves us well—it lowers stress and anxiety, and can even reduce the risk of developing various diseases and help us recover faster, according to studies like this one—the unrealistic kind can backfire badly. It’s part of why people save too little for retirement (“things will work out somehow”), fail to use sunscreen (“skin cancer? no way”), and don’t make prenuptial agreements (most people estimate their risk of divorce as zero percent.)

Finally, science has proven what we all were thinking: that blind optimists actively ignore dissenting information and do not justify their world view with facts. Volunteers in the study were asked to estimate the likelihood of an unfortunate event befalling them. Then they were shown the actual probability and asked to revise their estimates.

The good news is that people were not completely incapable of learning: they revised their estimates of the probability that they would suffer life’s various pitfalls—but only if they had overestimated that probability. In other words, if they had predicted that their likelihood of developing cancer was 40 percent, but learned that the lifetime risk is in fact 30 percent, they adjusted their estimate to a more reasonable 32 percent. But if they had underestimated the chance of falling victim to one of these incidents—saying they had a 10 percent risk of being robbed when in fact the chance is 20 percent—they basically stuck with their original guess.

The article raises but doesn’t answer the question of how these people are still alive. How does a blind optimist survive in the wild? “Oh please, there’s no way that tiger is gonna maul me.” Shouldn’t these people all be dead by now? I guess we’ll have to wait for the next study. But until science can find a positive use for irrational optimism, I suggest something that’s never failed me in tough times:

It’s rare that a cover surpasses the original—sorry Bowie fans but I’m going with Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold the World” as an example—but when it does, it’s almost certainly because the cover artist decided to take the original song in another direction, into another genre, added their own unmistakable touch to it. (Which raises a philosophical questions about a cover’s relationship to the original song.) In rare cases, a cover all but eclipses the original song, as with Mariah Carey’s “Without You,” soon to be itself eclipsed by Valentina Hasan’s “Ken Lee.”

Before yesterday, in my all-encompassing ignorance, I thought BBC Radio 1 was the only organization with the taste and sense of humor to put out consistently good covers with their Live Lounge series, but then I stumbled upon Billboard’s Mashup Mondays, which features a surprisingly wide range of artists covering an equally eclectic range of pop songs. Before you groan at the mention of pop, the familiarity of the covered songs really serves to highlight the differences in interpretation. The subtitle of the series is “Musical Contradictions.”

What’s best, they append a short interview with the artist explaining why they chose the song and what song of theirs they’d like the covered artist to cover.

For example, here’s Neon Trees with a cover of Justin Bieber’s “Baby.”

Another great entry is Wonder Girls doing B.O.B. and Bruno Mars’ “Nothin’ on You.” The arrangement is well though-out and the rap is as good as you can hope for.

The cover that takes the cake (thanks Oscar!), however, is Jeremih’s rendition of Adele’s “Rumor Has It.” For a guy whose hit song is about intercourse on your birthday, he sure can play the drums.

More information and videos are available on their website and YouTube playlist.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Leave it to Adam Gopnik to describe America’s embittered political climate in such cynical eloquence (emphasis mine):

The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal. They hate fast trains and efficient airports for the same reason that seventeenth-century Protestants hated the beautiful Baroque churches of Rome when they saw them: they were luxurious symbols of an earthly power they despised. Friendman and Mandelbaum [in their book "That Used to Be Us"] wring their hands at “our” unwillingness to sacrifice our comforts on behalf of our principles, but Americans are perfectly willing to sacrifice their comforts for their ideological convictions. We don’t have a better infrastructure or decent elementary education exactly because many people are willing to sacrifice faster movement between our great cities, or better-informed children, in support of their belief that the government should always be given as little money as possible.

It’s something that I’ve come to realize more and more, thanks to the Communist Party and the Tea Partiers. The world isn’t fucked up and shitty because no one cares. It’s that most people don’t care, and a slight minority are actively preventing the world from becoming a fairer, more just, more equitable, more progressive, more forward-thinking place. He goes on:

The crucial point is that this [situation] is the result of active choice, not passive difference: people who don’t want high-speed rail are not just indifferent to fast trains. They are offended by fast trains, as the New York Post is offended by bike lanes and open-air plazas: these things give too much pleasure to those they hate. They would rather have exhaust and noise and traffic jams, if such things sufficiently annoy liberals. Annoying liberals is a pleasure well worth paying for. As a recent study in the social sciences shows, if energy use in a household is monitored so that you can watch yourself saving money every month by using less, self-identified conservatives will actually use and spend more, apparently as a way of showing their scorn for liberal pieties.

There is a strand of terrorism running through this depiction. Indeed, a terrorist is more than willing to sacrifice his own well-being in order to harm others. So is it a surprise that the Tea Party and the Republicans responded to the debt ceiling crisis with brinkmanship? Is it a surprise that they run on campaigns of stopping and dismantling government? Gopnik concludes:

The kind of outlook that Friedman and Mandelbaum assume is somehow natural to mankind and has been thwarted [in America] recently—a broad-minded view of maximizing future utility—has from a historical perspective, a constituency so small as to be essentially nonexistent. In the long story of civilization, the moments when improving your lot beats out annoying your neighbor are vanishingly rare.

It’s like that old fable. If you see your neighbor with a beautiful house, there are two ways to get what he’s got. Either you build a beautiful house, or you destroy his.

About the name…

My Chinese name is 丁皛 (Ding Xiao). Xiao, a particularly arcane character, is written with three characters for “white,” or bai. Sometimes people don’t know how to read xiao end up calling it sanbai, which means “three whites.” Hence, dingsanbai.