Save the Children

Syria gases its own citizens. That's awful. Syria gases its own citizens, some of whom are children. That's demonic. I am disheartened, angered, and tilting toward misanthropic.

Humans reach a deeper level of empathy when children are the victims of slaughter because they're innocent. But what does innocent mean? They have yet to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Children only know what it's like to be a child. They are not racist because they have yet to know what racism means?

We are not children. We're not even adults. We're patriots, democrats, evangelical Christians, pro-life, limited government, vegan, ivy-league educated, and left brained. Aging is an exponential number of labels and definitions and ways of distinguishing "me" from "them."

Why is it so torturous to watch an eight-year-old girl holding a "God Hates Fags" sign? Because she's too young to make her own decision to be a bigot. She’s too innocent to submit her life to dogmatism. Like Salman Rushdie once wrote, “Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison.” (If you agree, you should be equally repulsed by seeing a newborn in a New York Yankees onesie.)

When a child dies because someone's label conflicted with someone else's label, we see the ugly beast in the mirror. Syria's civil war, like any battle, is a war of ideas. The deaths of innocent children remind us how much we get caught up in our labels and, for a moment, we envy their freedom from the straight jacket of ideas that we all wear.

We can never return to that innocence. We can only live vicariously through youth sports, playgrounds, public beaches, and any place where a kid is free of our restrictions that keep them from being kids.

Have you ever watched a kid in their element? They're excellent at it. We're still not good at being adults. We're still figuring it out. We wish we could go back to subsisting solely on the Tree of Life. Every time we take away a child's innocence – through war, indoctrination, sodomy – we get farther away from Eden.

Storytelling and Why Reading is Easier than Writing

The craft of writing is similar to social media management. Because everyone can do it, everyone thinks they can do it well.

Banging out 300 words of brochure copy, a letter from the president, or a 1,000 word feature story takes more than the amount of time it takes to read said copy. In fact, there is probably a figure out there that translates reading time to project time. For instance, if it takes you five minutes to read a story, it probably took five hours to complete. Especially when you factor in all the interviews, revisions, layout, and the muse. The latter is what is often left out. It has been said that one's writing is 90 percent of what they have read and 10 percent of what they are currently reading. As much as I like to think the genesis of all my ideas come from yours truly, they actually come from other ideas I've read or heard that have been filtered through my mind. Blah, blah blah, Inception reference. My point is that I need to be constantly reading good writing and learning about new ideas and new technology to have more meat for my writing.

The editing process is another brutal and thankless endeavor. No one notices when you are good at it, only when you screw up. Remember that time one of your readers called up and and said, "Excellent job on that magazine! I didn't find a single grammatical mistake." No? That's because it never happened in the history of the world.

It's perhaps because it is so easy to read through a magazine or brochure or web story that people assume it must be easy to create. "Oh, you wrote a 350 word story about some student and posted it to the website? What else did you do with the rest of your morning?" Never mind the relationships I had to build to even get that story, the time I spent tracking down the student, the lengthy interview process because the soft-spoken student did not want to talk, or the part-time photographer I transformed into to take the shot.

But it goes even deeper than that. I'm not just firing off stories for print, web, and media to fill my day. I'm building a brand. I'm telling the story of the institution. I seek student stories and ask questions that fit the mold of what I want the story of my employer to be.

Building a brand is not an overnight process. It is a quilt sewn together with strategic content. This is a fast moving digital world. The tone and delivery is changing. There is so much noise that only those in a particular key are going to be heard. Only those with their finger on the pulse of what that key is are going to know how to play.

Why Fear Makes Beautiful Art

James Salter published a new book this year. But so what? The man is 87. His most popular novel, The Hunters, was published in 1957. Chuck Palahniuk, a comparatively young whipper-snapper at 51, is supposed to publish a book this year. But his popularity has been in decline since 1996's Fight Club. People still read their work, but not with the same fervor as the aforementioned novels. I imagine that if you spoke to either writer, nothing has changed about their approach to writing a novel. So what's different? Why the decline?

One of my favorite bands, The National, released their eighth studio album this year. While it's a great effort, it does not come close to touching the magic they had on Alligator and Boxer. They're still the same band. They obviously still know how to craft music. Why can't they just sound like the used to?

I gleaned some insight about The National from this Grantland piece. Singer Matt Berninger speaks about a peace of mind while recording this record, not caring how it sounded to anyone but himself, and the comfort with what the band has already accomplished–even admitting he'd be fine with the band never recording another album.

I didn't see it at the time of reading the review, but I should have thought "bad omen." I've written before about the power that comes from two alpha males in a band that don't necessarily get along. As sick as it sounds, I'd rather hear Matt say "Recording this album almost broke the band up. Bryce and I daily got into fights over how songs should sound. I don't know if I have it in me to do this again."

Are there any exceptions to these writers and bands that can defy the gradual decline in their work? Off the top of my head, David Foster Wallace comes to mind. After reading his biography, I got the sense that he was obsessed with what other people thought about him. Writing, for him, was like torture. He always thought he had these huge expectations to live up to. It's odd that, for such a celebrated author, he really only wrote three novels. But they were all quality pieces of work. Infinite Jest was probably the best novel of Wallace's generation, but his fans will admit that his posthumous piece The Pale King was probably his best work.

So why did Wallace's work continue to improve over his 20-year writing career, despite his fame and success. My guess: he was afraid of failure. I think a part of his mental illness was that he suffered from an insatiable need to please others. He stressed out over everything he wrote because he thought it might fail.

This fear is what drives young, hungry bands. It's the reason so many great bands spilt up or give up. They either fret too much over making the perfect album or they become comfortable just making music. I don't think money changes them or they "sellout" by making more accessible, radio friendly music. They're just no longer afraid of returning to their old jobs.

Too much success leads people to thinking that their success is the result of raw talent. The hard work is no longer necessary because they know what they're doing now. Success leads to complacency and the gradual decline of all great artists. Like Neil Young said, "It's better to burn out than it is to rust."

The Invisible Hand of Social Media

Have you ever explained something to a child or a person with no knowledge of the subject matter, and through the process of explaining you come to understand the subject matter better than before?

This happened to me recently while trying to explain what makes social media "work." What makes someone good at tweeting? Anyone can create a Twitter page, Facebook page, Instagram profile, et cetera. But what are the people doing that creates huge followings, multiple retweets, numerous likes and comments?

One of the first people to really "get" Twitter was Ashton Kutcher. It's odd when you think that he never took a marketing class or attended a social media webinar. And yet he had a huge following. Sure it helps that he's a celebrity, but there are many celebrities who don't come close to his Klout score.

And then there are so-called social media gurus that give presentations to amateur audiences where they basically explain what a hashtag is and how to make a Facebook profile private. They claim to be experts but most of them do a terrible job of engaging with their audience on their own social media pages—which is really what social media is about. Who cares how many friends you have? How many people comment on your post–that is the true measure of engagement.

It's the successful social media mavens like Kutcher whom are studied by those in the budding social media industry. They set the tone for what social media webinars discuss as best practices. It's difficult to sort them out since so many people are on social media—there is no gatekeeper filtering out those who are not "good" at it.

That's when I realized that social media is a free market. There are no rules for what a person must do to start a Facebook page or Twitter handle. Just like there are no rules from what a grocery store puts on their shelves, it just works by trial and error. Social media simply allows everyone to post whatever they want and users naturally gravitate toward people that share a similar set of practices. Ashton Kutcher didn't develop a strategy and implement it into his Twitter feed, he just used it in a way that made sense. The free market of social media chose him.

What are the practices that successful users implement?

• Be humorous, but keep it PG.
• Be informal and friendly, but use correct grammar and spelling.
• Keep it conversational, social media is a telephone and not a megaphone.
• Be pithy. No one wants to read multiple tweets to get your point.
• Say it with a photo. Pictures are more pleasing than words.

It took a number of years, a lot of poorly executed profiles, and Adam Smith's invisible hand to formulate these "rules" but that's what an open market does. People flock to a business that puts out a good product. We know the product is successful based on sales. Likewise, people flock toward social media brands that follow the above rules.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Death

Yesterday a friend of mine's brother died. His name was Seth Machak.

He had been admitted to a hospital days earlier after vomiting blood and was diagnosed with pneumonia. His lungs were bleeding and later filling up with fluid. His oxygen levels were low and he never left the ICU. The doctor's said the pneumonia was likely the result of a staph infection.

Whenever we find out that someone close to us has died, usually the first question we ask is "How did they die?" I think the reason is that we want to make sure that it won't happen to us. Especially as was the case with Seth, when the victim is young and healthy. Any untimely death is bad, but if we can find a cause like driving drunk, overdosing on drugs, or a smoker that developed lung cancer, we can at least say "I avoid that lifestyle. That won't happen to me."

But when it's a staph infection. . . .

When I was about ten-years old, I remember going through one of my dad's high school yearbooks. He found me, sat next to me, and began skimming through his classmates and pointing out the ones that are now dead. He wasn't being dark or callous or humorous, just very matter-of-fact. I remember thinking "How old will I be before I start doing that with my high school yearbook?"

I can think of four students, other than Seth, whom I knew well in high school that are dead now. One choked on his own vomit in his sleep while inebriated. Two killed themselves; one by rope and one by firearm. One died of a heart condition.

And now Seth dies from something that could have happened to anyone.

I used to look at people's lives as stories. They all end at some point, vary in length, some are humorous, and some are depressing. Now I'm starting to personify death, much like the grim reaper. The longer you live, the more people he is going to take and it doesn't matter to him how they go. He is going to come after people you love.

People die young. Even good people who seem to be doing all the right things in life. Death doesn't care. When you're time is up, it's up.

I've reached a point in my life where death is no longer something that happens to older people. My annual ratio of weddings to funerals still strongly favors the former, but the latter is no longer just a blip on the radar. It is real. And it's going to keep growing each year and eventually tilt the scales.

Even though I did not know Seth well, his passing made me realize how close we all may be to the end of our stories. And just how precious and valuable the gift of life is.