Do short but intense exercise once a week.

It also helps to make sure tasks are connected to something you care about for its own sake,22 at least through a chain: you read the book so you can pass the test so you can get the grade so you can get the job you want and have a fulfilling career. Breaking the chain leaves a task feeling meaningless.

HHIPP: “Radical candor is humble, it’s helpful, it’s immediate, it’s in person — in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise — and it doesn’t personalize.” That last P makes a key distinction: “My boss didn’t say, ‘You're stupid.’ She said, ‘You sounded stupid when you said um.’ There's a big difference between the two.”

It’s useful to keep in mind that massive student debt is only a recent development, arising since the 1980s, and 10 years ago, the idea of abolishing it or enacting free public higher education were considered pie-in-the-sky proposals. But they’re on the agenda now, and we have to keep working to accrue the data, build the narratives and devise policies that aim toward more equality.

. One of the distinct pleasures in Pixar’s films is the pleasure of seeing the deepest of human struggles, timeless philosophical questions projected in and through remote forms of representation.

the peculiar self-alienation—and particularly the alienation from the body—experienced by technologically immersed humans

The de-cision of Pixar to mirror the techniques of the cinema—to render things not in perfect focus but to invent in the realm of the digital blurry focus, shadow and darkness, is an important part of the emotional and philosophical make-up of these films, and links Pixar with “so-phisticated” cinema, making it a part of a cinematic canon in ways that margin-alized animation has rarely been.

Pixar realized the diminish-ing value of transient references in the creation of timeless classics and has mined an alternative set of “universal” pleasures.

These films transform the interstitial space between man and his graven objects (robots and toys) into a virtue, exploiting its uncan-niness to provoke a distant kind of fear while maintaining an innocent and un-censorable narrative.

While its uncertain jitters are less obvious than the uncontrolled movement of a child, there is a sense in which adulthood is less about gaining control than about steadily losing control. It is about, as Woody and Buzz discuss, managing to fall gracefully rather than to fly.

Thus, these Pixar features exploit the tendency of the ratings system to judge the “adult-ness” of a film based on its sex and vio-lence quotient alone. They remind us of something that the rating system appar-ently doesn’t know: that sexual titilla-tion and violence are not the only wages of adulthood. They are only manifesta-tions of far deeper crises and struggles. The films revive a broad cinematic discourse open to child and adult alike about the strange, imaginary life of ob-jects and the complexity of the project of material being

For the adult spectator, facing their own crises and resultant revisionings of the mean-ings of love, obsolescence, childhood, aging, and life, these films both avoid and, oddly, abstractly materialize the real life and existential questions that adult viewers face. As such they provide a unique set of spectatorial experiences that while not strictly pleasurable pro-vide the relative pleasure of distanced contemplation while still insisting on confrontation of the very adult stuff R-rated films exploit by visualizing with an overt, superficial, and sometimes overwhelming directness.

The encouragement these toys offer each other to stop struggling and accept death undermines the hope-fulness of previous Toy Story texts, be-cause it reminds us that these toys will ultimately become maimed, broken, and tortured “junk.” It reminds us of the du-bious status of the object—and of the objectified—in a culture built around commodity fetishism. It encourages a kind of revisionist mental return to the previous texts, revising their innocent themes and visual pleasures against the weight of so dreadful a demise. What is more, it places spectators in the position of identifying with the toys in their help-lessness and in their reversion to junk

to raise a perhaps even more unsettling set of questions about being, existence and materiality

surface some challenging and even undermining of these stereo-types do appear, those challenges re-main short-lived in light of the situation comedy’s goals to entertain while rein-forcing the status quo.