There’s a great part in Bill Cosby: Himself when he tells a story about cooking breakfast for his kids at 6 a.m. Instead of serving standard breakfast fare, he gives his children chocolate cake. It’s a funny story, because of the absurdity of serving cake for breakfast. However, Cosby may have been on to something.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have discovered that dessert can help dieters lose more weight–and keep it off in the long run–if they make it a part of their breakfasts.

You should focus on indulging in the morning. That’s when your body’s metabolism is its most active, and when you’re better able to work off the extra calories throughout the day, the researchers say.

Attempting to avoid sweets entirely can create a psychological addiction to these same foods in the long-term, explains Professor Daniela Jakubowicz. Adding dessert items to breakfast can control cravings throughout the rest of the day. Over the course of a 32 week-long study, detailed in the journal Steroids, participants who added dessert to their breakfast–cookies, cake, or chocolate–lost an average of 40 pounds more than a group that avoided such foods. What’s more, they kept off the pounds longer.

It seems pretty common sense that eating more calories in the morning would help curb cravings later in the day.

Highly restrictive diets that forbid desserts and carbohydrates are initially effective, but often cause dieters to stray from their food plans as a result of withdrawal-like symptoms. They wind up regaining much of the weight they lost during the diet proper.

The study’s participants consumed the same daily amount of calories, but “the participants in the low carbohydrate diet group had less satisfaction, and felt that they were not full.”

Their sugar and carb cravings were more intense and they chose to cheat on their diets plans.

“But the group that consumed a bigger breakfast, including dessert, experienced few if any cravings for these foods later in the day,” Jakubowicz said.

It looks like I’ll be eating fewer eggs and more cake for breakfast now. Come to think of it, bacon cake sounds delicious.

Bonus: The cake story in Bill Cosby: Himself

(Photo via Flickr: Slice of Chic / Creative Commons)

I know this is my second post in a row about marriage. This one, though, is ammunition for those who favor cohabitation more than getting married.

According a new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family, married coupled are no better off than unmarried couples who live together. In fact, cohabitation is better for a couple in the long run.

“Marriage has long been an important social institution, but in recent decades western societies have experienced increases in cohabitation, before or instead of marriage, and increases in children born outside of marriage,” said Dr Kelly Musick, associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University’s College of Human Ecology. “These changes have blurred the boundaries of marriage, leading to questions about what difference marriage makes in comparison to alternatives.”

Musick’s study focused on issues of happiness, depression, health, and social ties. The findings show that feelings of well-being and happiness were high after a honeymoon period for married and cohabitation couples alike. But that good feeling does last long.

“We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains – likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans – cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem. For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy, and personal growth” Musick said. “Compared to most industrial countries, America continues to value marriage above other family forms. However, our research shows that marriage is by no means unique in promoting well-being and that other forms of romantic relationships can provide many of the same benefits.”

I’ve always heard that marriage really doesn’t change anything if you’re already living together. Now we have a study proving that saying. However, this raises the question: Why then get married? Are you doing it for tax purposes? Child raising purposes? Or do you feel more committed because you’re married?

(Photo via Flickr: Rodrigo Müller / Creative Commons)

There’s a Honda car commercial currently running that takes a swipe at marriage. Familiar with it? If not, here it is:

Is anyone else bothered by the suggestion that someone can’t do things such as learn to play the drums or shoot a short film after getting married? Once you get married, I guess you’re supposed to sit on your butt all day or dote on your partner.

I get what Honda is doing: They’re playing off the old fear that marriage is suffocating. Now, I know a lot of people whose relationships were fine until they got married, but the union never stopped them from doing things for themselves. According to Honda, married people can’t live life to the fullest. Or worse, share dreams and aspirations with another person

The other Honda commercial, the one where the actor says they have so much to do before having a baby, that one makes more sense. Bringing a third party into your party takes more planning and consideration.

Still, a baby (or anyone) should not stop you from living the life you want to live. As long as you’re not purposely hurting others, do what ever you want to do, labeled or saddled.

I always include Scott Bradfield when people ask me who are some of my favorite writers. I base this solely on such works as The History of Luminous Motion, Animal Planet, and What’s Wrong With America.

But those books were long ago, and I was young and impressionable. Would a work more recent hold up to my memories? The answer is yes, with The People Who Watched Her Pass By. Bradfield remains a favorite of mine, and he’s one of America’s great satirists. I imagine he’ll be a writer whose fame and influence will arise after he’s dead. Please don’t let that happen; read him now. Talk about him now. Buy all his books now.

The People Who Watched Her Pass By is a story about Salome Jensen, a 3-year-old girl kidnapped by a boiler-repair man, who she refers to as “Daddy” throughout the story. As with his previous books, specifically Luminous Motion, Bradfield gives the child protagonist a worldly, aged, adult voice. Daddy doesn’t stick around, so Salome (Sal, for short) lives with someone else. Eventually, Sal bounces around different caregivers, either by choice or circumstance. The way she travels from one situation to another clearly lands this novel in the great America road trip genre.

Sal’s story is more than her kidnapping and wandering. It’s a satirical look at selfishness, ego, and the ache for a greater meaning in life. The people who Sal encounters offer sage advice, but in the end, they’re really looking out for only their own wants and needs. Their concerns for Sal are superficial, and she recognizes this early in her so-far short life.

One of my favorite sections in the book is Sal’s persona as a deity, or prophet, by strangers who haven’t seen her, who have only heard rumors of her life. The worship of the unknown is a strong pull for most people, and reading about them lining up just to take a picture of her room’s window is humorous and sad at the same time.

This same temptation for something greater pulls at Sal, too. The difference, though, is she’s doing it for herself. She’s like Jesus wandering in the desert, figuring out who she really is. Other people, specifically adults, in the book try to find themselves through others. Their narcissism is only fed by extraneous encounters and emotions.

This raises the question: What does Sal represent? Bradfield wrote that he didn’t have a purpose in writing the book.

“As with my previous novels, I simply discovered the voice of a character who carried me along until I found out where she was going,” he wrote in a blog post. “Then I spent several years trying to give her, and her story, shape.”

The issue of shape is where satire comes into play. Is Sal a critique of the modern American psyche, always looking for solutions from others via self-help books and reality TV instead of finding it within itself? Is it a story about being responsible for your choices, regardless of what others think? Or is it an acknowledgment that life is a gyre and that one should accept fate and use it to the best of your advantage? Maybe it’s all of those. Maybe it’s none of those. As with the best satirists, Bradfield gives his readers a beautifully written and deeply contemplative story. It’s one that when you’re finished, you’ll want to immediately begin again, like a magic trick you want to experience over and over, always thinking you’re about to discover the solution, only to find you’re still in the dark. But what a delicious darkness that is.

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are two shows I never miss. I think my obsessiveness of watching them is due to that completist personality I mentioned. Or maybe it’s because I’m a deep thinker.

Hey, I didn’t say it first–a University of Delaware assistant professor in communications did. Dannagal Young surveyed 398 undergraduate students about their views of 13 different TV genres. And she discovered “meaningful differences” in how people watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, finding that some viewers watch the show more for context than information or fun.

Such viewers exhibit high “need for cognition,” a psychological term used to describe people who engage in and enjoy arguments, ideas and the analysis of problems and their solutions.

“It’s not about capacity to think,” Young explains. “It’s about their enjoyment of thinking.”

Young feels that “such viewers are not just watching the show for different reasons; they’re likely experiencing different impacts as a result,” Artika Rangan Casini reported for UDaily.

“We know that the reasons people seek out information strongly affect the implications of those messages,” she says. “In this case, people coming to the show looking for satirical analysis of political information may exhibit more long-lasting shifts in attitude.”

All this talk about thinking reminds me of a Brecht quote: “Thinking is one of the chief pleasures of the human race.” And for me, so is watching Jon and Stephen deliver news in humorous ways.

There was much talk about innovation and creativity in 2011. In fact, I heard or saw the word innovation so much that its mention would bring on waves of hostility in me. Everyone talked about it, making it not, well, very innovative.

Most writers were telling you what to do to be innovative or creative. Rarely did you read why it happens. It’s as most people wanted to jump to instruction without knowing reason.

That’s where Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer comes in. As with his previous book, How We Decide, Lehrer explores the basis of a brain function that everyone wants to know about. Yes, he does offer creativity advice, but he bases it in reason. You have to know the hows and whys before you can know the whats.

Lehrer leads readers through many examples of innovation and creativity, touching on everything from how Bob Dylan found his writing muse to how no-wrong-answers brainstorming doesn’t work in the long run to the benefits of living in a city. And he keeps your interest, because he’s a great storyteller who asserts authority. He doesn’t just report research; he guides with pristine narrative.

“The Power of Q” chapter is one of the more interesting sections. It’s about socialist Brian Uzzi and his study of Broadway musicals, about why some are successful and some are not. Uzzi found that successful productions needed a certain amount of people who have known each other for a long time and a certain amount who are new to the operation. In other words, a sweet spot of social intimacy is needed.

The reason I found this chapter interesting is because around the same time I was reading it, the Dallas Mavericks were restructuring their championship team, losing several players that helped them win it all last season. I’ve always been one that feels you don’t break up the house, you keep teams together for the long-term in order to ensure yearly success. After reading this chapter, though, I’m thinking differently about teams (sports or work). Perhaps it is best that the Mavericks shook things up, bringing in some new faces to play with a few of the old-timers. (However, maybe it’s not working; the Mavericks are 1-4 at the time of this review.)

What Lehrer suggests–and something he consistently suggests in his writings–is that you should know yourself best. Find what works for you, because for every piece of research saying one thing, there will be another saying the opposite. Maybe you work better getting away from a problem. Or maybe you work better with a group. However you work best, identify that and edge toward it. That is where you’ll find your creativity. For you see, science is primarily about paying attention, and until you pay attention to yourself first, nothing will change. Lehrer’s latest book is a great tool toward this needed self-consciousness in society.

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will publish Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer in March 2012.)

Every year I post my annual list of which books I read, a list that helps me remember past events and feelings that I may have forgotten, like resting in my hammock on a nice summer day reading The Truth About Celia or the eagerness I felt flying to Italy while reading Poets in a Landscape. You could say that I remember things through the books I’ve read. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to live.  Happy reading in 2012, everyone!

Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Me, Myself & I by Edward Albee
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr.
The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute
Augustus by John Williams
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The Commedia dell’Arte by Giacomo Oreglia
The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack
The Actor’s Art and Craft by William Esper and Damon DiMarco
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
Slowness by Milan Kundera
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out by Mick Napier
Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee (editors)
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Jitney by August Wilson
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honday Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The Night Season by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Seven Guitars by August Wilson
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Jokers by Albert Cossery
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis

One of my band mates, Lance Pilgrim, and I decided to work on some new material in which we primarily play old organs and Casio keyboards. We’ve never really done much psychedelic or electronic music before, so this is new territory for us.

We’re happy so far with the results. We’re going to continue working on two songs at a time, much like a single and a b-side. And we’re calling our project Genius Cult. The following are our first two songs for public ears. Please enjoy.

A former band mate of mine once told me he would be happy to have a one-hit wonder. I thought he was crazy. I wanted a long life full of hits (and fame and groupies and all that comes with the rock-n-roll lifestyle). One-hit wonders seemed so fleeting and defining.

Besides, a musician doesn’t set out to write one hit song and then retire for life. If that happened, hit songs would be easy to craft and more people would do it.

But stop the record. A new study has found what it takes for a song to be a hit. University of Bristol researchers claim that predictions can be made using machine learning algorithms.

The team looked at the official U.K. top 40 singles chart over the past 50 years. Their aim was to distinguish the most popular (peak position top five) songs from less popular singles (peak position 30 to 40).

The researchers used musical features such as, tempo, time signature, song duration and loudness. They also computed more detailed summaries of the songs such as harmonic simplicity, how simple the chord sequence is, and non-harmonicity, how ‘noisy’ the song is.

A ‘hit potential equation’ that scores a song according to its audio features was devised. The equation works by looking at all the U.K. hits for a certain time and measuring their audio features. From this the researchers had a list of weights, telling then how important each of the 23 features was and allowing them to compute a score for a song.

The researchers classified songs as hits or not-hits based on their scores. The team had a 60 percent accuracy rate and noticed some interesting trends.

• Before the 1980s, the danceability of a song was not very relevant to its hit potential. From then on, danceable songs were more likely to become a hit. Also the average danceability of all songs on the charts suddenly increased in the late 1970s.
• In the 1980s, slower musical styles (tempo 70-89 beats per minute), such as ballads, were more likely to become a hit.
• The prediction accuracy of the researchers’ hit potential equation varies over time. It was particularly difficult to predict hits around 1980. The equation performed best in the first half of the 1990s and from the year 2000. This suggests that the late 1970s and early 1980s were particularly creative and innovative periods of pop music.
• Up until the early 1990s , hits were typically harmonically simpler than other songs of the era. On the other hand, from the 1990s onward hits more commonly have simpler, binary, rhythms such as 4/4 time.
• On average, all songs on the chart are becoming louder. Additionally, the hits are relatively louder than the songs that dangle at the bottom of the charts, reflected by a strong weight for the loudness feature.

You can read more about the research at ScoreaAHit.

My favorite trend is the part about the late 1970s and early 1980s as periods of more creative and innovative music. I definitely agree with that.

Now, if you’ll pardon me, I have a hit song to write. The secret formula has been found.

(Photo via Flickr: Paul Townsend / Creative Commons)

I’m a completist. I don’t know why. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that when I find something that I enjoy, and it appears in a series, I have to complete it.

My latest obsession is with New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics. I read one (Stoner by John Williams), loved it, and decided to see what else was in the series. I’d find one at Half Price Books (“Oh, this looks interesting, too!), buy it, and put it next to the previous one. This process repeated itself until now, where I find myself wanting (daresay, needing) to collect the whole series.

I know this is crazy. I won’t read every single book immediately or even like all the ones I read. But that’s not the point, which is to complete the collection.

I’ve done the same thing with the Best American Series (Short Stories, Travel, Science and Nature, Essays, Non-required Reading, Poetry) and the O. Henry series. Have I read any one volume of those all the way through? You can safely bet no. There was even a time I collected all the Shakespeare plays in individual volumes by a certain publisher because I liked the woodcuts used on the covers. This is ridiculous because I have many copies of his plays in anthologies scattered throughout the house. Do I really need four copies of Hamlet? Apparently, the answer is yes.

The completist in me is not something new. I collected baseball cards, coins, stamps, records, etc. when I was younger. I never saw it before as a problem, which makes worrying about it now kind of crazy.

The cliched saying is that if you know you’re crazy, then you’re not crazy. Then what am I? Perhaps being a completist is a type of crazy that’s more accepted in society, or at least it was. Hoarders has spoiled that game. Now when I bring a new NYRB book home because it’s part of “the collection,” my plus-one rolls her eyes, silently saying cuckoo cuckoo.

Or maybe I’m obsessing too much on the obsessing. I should focus on the pleasure I get from these books beautifully aligned on my shelf, knowing they are ready for me when I’m ready for them. I should obsess on the knowledge that I have a lifetime of reading ahead of me.

And I will, just as soon as I finish completing this collection.