20 Things You Didn’t Know

The Book of the Week is “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything” by the editors of Discovery Magazine and Dean Christopher, published in 2008.  This book briefly covers a range of topics, regaling the reader with trivia and interesting factoids.

One topic covered was airport security. As might be recalled, at this book’s writing, “The U.S. government continues to spend untold billions developing technology designed to detect weapons [which were never found in Iraq]– but extremely little on techniques and training to ferret out troublemakers at our airports.”

There are at least sixteen thousand classified species of bees. On average, bees fly at fifteen miles per hour. The honey they make can be used as an antibacterial wound-healer, because it contains certain infection-fighting substances. The chapter on mosquitoes lamented that people must learn to live with the blood-sucking bugs; however, it completely failed to mention that there exist fish that eat mosquito eggs, thus keeping the pest’s population down in certain places in the world, such as Florida and Australia.

At the book’s writing, there was a museum on the history of contraceptives in Toronto, Canada. Read the book to learn additional fun information.

Behind the Times

The Book of the Week is “Behind the Times, Inside the New York Times” by Edwin Diamond, published in 1993. This book tells the history of the newspaper and the people who, through generations, to help it stay in business, changed its contents, its target readers (and therefore its sales territory) and its personnel.

In the 1950’s, the Times consisted of four realms: the weekday paper, the Sunday edition, the foreign correspondents, and the Washington bureau. Each had its own hierarchy, but all employees encountered an arrogant corporate culture because their difficulty in getting hired helped project an image of an exclusive club from which they derived prestige.

In the 1980’s, the paper was forced to look to the suburbs for readers, and acquire various west-coast newspapers, a magazine group and broadcast properties. Advertisers were able to glean significantly more marketing data and more predictable circulation numbers on readers with expanded home delivery.

The Times was a family-owned enterprise whose eventual patriarch, Punch Sulzberger served as the top leader for three decades, into the early 1990’s.  Unfortunately, he was resistant to change, so finalizing a decision to make a major revision to the paper, say, to add a section or column, took months or even years.

A task force did not always help speed up the process because the business and news departments had different goals. Finally, in 1982, the business side sold out in the name of staying in business. The managing editor began to allow “product placement” in news stories. In the 1980’s, a financial turnaround was enjoyed by the paper, in large part thanks to fashion reporting.

Around the same time, the Times’ hegemony reached its peak when competing print news sources had gone out of business. Many readers used the paper as their bible as to which performing arts shows to attend, which movies and videos to view, and which books to read. The paper was eventually taken to task– for its conflicts of interest in its exertion of extreme undue influence of such entertainment for decades– by someone who had a point. However, that someone also had an ulterior motive aside from exposing greed and abuse of power.

Sadly, the 1990’s gave way to more and more opinion writing rather than conveyance of new information. Read the book to learn much more about the reasons for the changing Times.

Werner Erhard

The Book of the Week is “Werner Erhard, The Transformation of a Man, The Founding of est” by W.W. Bartley, III, published in 1978. This is a biography of the founder of a consciousness-raising movement of the 1970’s.

Born with the name Jack Rosenberg in 1935, the subject of this biography grew up in the Philadelphia area, raised as an Episcopalian. He was the oldest of three siblings, who were born after he turned twelve years old. As a teenager, he rebelled against his mother, who treated him like a spouse rather than a son. Additionally, he got his girlfriend pregnant. Rosenberg and his girlfriend wed just after he turned eighteen years old. They had three additional children but he abandoned his family and absconded with another woman. Rosenberg thought of himself as a victim. In his words, “That requires that someone must have done it to you. That person is automatically bad, and may be punished. As a victim, you get to be righteous…”

In May 1960, Jack Rosenberg changed his name to Werner Erhard in order to transform himself into the complete opposite of what he once was. This also involved cutting off all communication with his first wife, children and immediate family. This he did for more than a decade. But in his new self, Erhard found his calling. He was a spellbinder as a salesman. He began training sales forces and making lots of money. Erhard used an unconventional approach to door-to-door sales: communication based on trust through total honesty rather than attempting to make a quick buck. He became incredibly well-read in psychology and philosophy.

Finally, Erhard jumped on the behavior-modification-training bandwagon fad of the 1970’s, naming his business “Erhard Seminars Training.” He held therapy sessions for hundreds of people at a time, pressuring them to change the “positionalities” of their minds by getting rid of their righteousness, regret and resentment. He lectured them on perfectionism with regard to attention to detail. Anything less would mean they were just surviving and not maximizing happiness.

In the real world, people tolerate bad customer service and mean corporate cultures because they must; in the ideal world Erhard envisioned– people’s effective, honest communication would help them shed their value judgments in their existence, activities and possessions in a way that would make them happy.

Read the book to learn a wealth of additional details on Erhard’s life and how he came to realize that he was meant to help his customers and clients improve their lives.