Research suggeststhat making these motions will improve our own performance: people who

“To me, the nature of the actor’s life is that we do the job, we do the best we can, and move on.”

Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”

Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?”

Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”

In psychology, self-affirmation theory suggests that reflecting on our personal values, we are less likely to experience distress when confronted with information that threatens our sense of self. Self-affirmation consists in engaging in activities that promote our values, our beliefs, and the roles we consider to our personal identity. These activities help us to establish and assert our concept of self. 

I thought about my children, one of whom plays the flute, but unwillingly, and therefore won’t practice. Yes, I thought about my children, only one of whom might shake your hand while the other would sooner spit on it, though they will both reliably do an elaborate orchestration of armpit farting while I’m trying to hear myself think. I thought of my mother and father, and an earlier conversation I had with my sisters that day about where to arrange our parents in a room for one of our kids’ bar mitzvahs so that they wouldn’t interact, so raw still are the wounds 35 years after their divorce.

Creating and calling a default proc is a waste of time, and Cramming everything into one line using tortured constructs doesn't make the code more efficient--it just makes the code harder to understand.

The administration and its allies fear that the more people gravitate toward the successful, free-market self-insurance approach, the worse their government-engineered health “reform” will look. We’re already seeing the beginning of this trend.

a new generation of dictionaries that were based on real examples of English - the type of English that people speak and write every day

We’ll make sure that decisions that need to be made post-launch are informed by actual facts of user behavior, not just best guesses.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived D and is, as it were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells i him epic fables as if they were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free;

This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself-in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity-is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

But let imitation (for I must frequently repeat the same precept) not be confined merely to words.

The actor will also be required to teach how a narrative should be delivered, with what authority persuasion should be enforced, with what force anger may show itself, and what tone of voice is adapted to excite pity