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Four Hundred Words for Six Hundred Dollars

The announcement arrived through LJExpress on a Friday in late July, dressed in the language of service. Media Source, the company that owns Library Journal, School Library Journal, The Horn Book, and the Junior Library Guild, had opened a storefront called Open Shelf Reviews, aimed at independent authors and small presses, and the copy asked me to hold two ideas at once: the reviews would be paid for by the authors under review, and a wall would keep those purchased reviews away from the magazines whose names give the wall its worth. The company described the operation as “a clearly identified paid service,” with its own editor, reviewer pool, and website, all kept apart from the editorial processes that made Library Journal matter to librarians for a century and a half.

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A Hopeless Whipsaw Cascade of Warping and Woofing: Managing Your Own Feels

In the Rise of the Millennials, feelings are given a whole new status above and beyond any shared fact or shred of righteous communal reality. Today, “feels” are peculiarly individualized, and non-universal, and they are now powerful cudgels used against the unwashed and unwitting others.

Instead of honoring every whim and ninny, we need to be in control of our own feelings, evaluate the reality surrounding them in context beyond the self, and then make a rational, logical, decision on what to do next based on perceptive thinking and not on implied — explicit or otherwise — slights and insights and invented microaggressions and their ilk.  We must not only keenly know the difference between purposeful cruelty and interpreted, environmental, intention, we must proactively act upon the right result.

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Stop Smiling and Live Longer

Why are you smiling?  Let out your true feelings and live longer as you wallow in your deserved misery of hatred and despise!

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The Love Bank: An Investment Strategy

by Tammy Tillotson

“We’re all born with a Love Bank. The people we meet are
automatically assigned their own “accounts,” and every
experience we have with them affects the balances of love
units in their accounts.” — Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Money and love have historically battled a gruesome duel to determine which will ultimately succeed in “making the world go ‘round.”

The Love Bank
As the victor is largely a decision based on biased perception, an opportunity for the two to reign hand in hand has quickly become one of my favorite metaphors to discuss with beginning investors like myself. The concept of a Love Bank is brilliant, however it is also incredibly underdeveloped.

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