Monthly Archives: November 2012

In this Monday’s Link Roundup I couldn’t resist Photographer Turns His Grandmother Into a Not-Yet-Retired Superhero.  Forget the video and book legacies. It’s time to break out the spandex! And speaking of grandmothers, take a look at Arlington’s Martha Ann Miller, 101, publishes her autobiography, just as she said she would.  Now there’s no excuse not to start writing your memoir. If you’re working up a sweat over your work, take a look at Effortless. Seth Godin always seems to say so much in so little a space.

• Untrack: Letting Go of the Stress of Measuring. “There are a few old management adages that seem to run like a current through our society, powering our work and personal lives: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” and “You are what you measure” and “You get what you measure”. And I’ve fallen for it myself…Measurement and tracking are tools, and there’s nothing wrong with using them. I’ve obviously used them many times, and still recommend them to most people. I just think we should consider whether there are alternatives, and question our dogma, and experiment to see what works best for us.”

• Effortless. “Sometimes, “never let them see you sweat,” is truly bad advice. The work of an individual who cares often exposes the grit and determination and effort that it takes to be present.”

• Photographer Turns His Grandmother Into a Not-Yet-Retired Superhero. “When most people try to lighten their grandmothers’ spirits, the effort often takes the form of Sunday afternoon phone calls and perhaps the occasional visit. Not so with Sacha Goldberger, however. After the French fashion and advertising photographer found out his nonagenarian grandmother was feeling blue, he came up with a rather adventurous solution for restoring her good cheer: spandex. He decided to enlist her to save the world, or at least depict her doing so on film.”

• Arlington’s Martha Ann Miller, 101, publishes her autobiography, just as she said she would. “When a 100-year-old woman tells you she’s writing her autobiography, you nod politely and think, “Yeah, right.” So here’s Martha Ann Miller of Arlington, now 101, and here’s her polished, published autobiography: 255 pages with great photos throughout, featuring the inside story of how Arlington became the first district in Virginia to desegregate its schools. And how Miller was one of the first teachers to participate in that desegregation.”[Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]

• Baby boomers are obsessing publicly about their mortality. “Not only are baby boomers getting old, many of them are hearing bad news from their doctors. And as with everything else that has happened to them – careers, marriage, children, divorce – they are obsessing about their mortality, and often in public. Many of them are even preparing pre-death testimonials so that they can control their posthumous images.”

• Personal memoir as social history. “[The World in Our Time]… is a memoir par excellence. It recaptures the life-experience of one of India’s leading historians, who experienced the mutation of India’s rural society under colonialism and then witnessed his country’s birth as an independent nation, associated as it was, with some of the most painful facets of human experience. But each turning point in the author’s life is presented with a historical hindsight, which also makes the memoir a history of his time.”

• Famous Canadians, revived by their obituaries. “As cub reporters, we felt sorry for the veterans of the newsroom when they were relegated to writing obituaries, presumably as a preamble to their own professional demise. Globe and Mail features writer Sandra Martin’s Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada, thoroughly demonstrates how wrong we were: Capturing the landscape of an entire life in a single column, on deadline, is among the most challenging – and sacred – of assignments.”

If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email.