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Two senior management consultants are chatting with each other between meetings:

“I heard we managed to staff the new project in New Jersey. Sounds like a good team — I don’t know the junior guy, do you?” says the first.

“I don’t know Greg yet either,” says the second. “But I’m relieved we were able to secure somebody, given how short-staffed we are. I know he’s got lots of experience doing this type of assignment, but I’m not sure if it’s something he loves or if he’s just in a rut. I’m hoping it’s the first, of course — it could be like pulling teeth otherwise, since this is going to be such a tough engagement. We’ll see, I guess.”

Senior executives in professional firms aspire to match the right people to the right work, but here, these senior executives don’t have enough to go on. Facing pressure to staff a project quickly, there’s little to stop them from assuming that Greg wants his next assignment to be just like projects he’s done in the past.

But what if that’s not so? How would they know? They have no idea how his past achievements relate to his future interests and development goals. Greg has not done a good enough job telling his own story in this company and so he’s allowed other people to define him.

Greg, in short, lacks a career narrative.

This is not surprising. In recent years, much has been written about the importance of career narratives for mid-career and senior professionals, particularly those making a career transition. But, we’d argue, they’re even more important for younger professionals who don’t yet have a multipage CV or a high-powered headhunter in their corner. What, then, makes for an effective narrative?

First, it should be easy to remember and retell. The whole point is to give your colleagues a narrative that quickly comes to mind whenever they’re asked about you, preventing them from making assumptions and drawing conclusions on their own. Two or four sentences, maximum.

Second, it should meaningfully link your past successes to your near and long-term development needs and suggest the kinds of assignments that would help to achieve those objectives. Those goals might certainly be developmental (to test a particular skill; gain experience with a certain tool or methodology; explore a specific industry). But they can also be more personal (limit travel to spend time with family, for instance).Think of it as a “sound-bite resume” — on hearing it, senior professionals should have two reactions. First, they should be interested in working with you. Second, they should know if it makes sense for you to work with them.

Third, your narrative needs to hang together with the right combination of honesty, humility, and personal flavor. Doing so creates an authentic and compelling career narrative. Narratives that just articulate a string of successes are not credible and are not likely to be repeated. Similarly, boilerplate chronicles without any personal flair rarely get traction.

An example of a poor narrative would be this:

“I wanted to work in biotech, so that’s why I joined the firm. I’ve had a lot of experience in labs, and I’m still considering graduate school.”

While it has the virtue of being short, this narrative doesn’t connect this person’s experiences to any goals that could be furthered by work within the firm. He mentions his initial interest in “biotech” but doesn’t explain how that interest is evolving and what additional experience he’s therefore seeking. As a result, it fails to make clear what type of assignment he would ideally be staffed on.

Make a few tweaks, though, and we have a powerful career narrative:

“I worked in labs through college and entered the firm with a strong interest in health care clients. I’ve had the opportunity to develop my quantitative financial skills in the comfortable context of health care. Now I’d like to test those skills with other commercial clients to determine what industry most interests me over the long term. That said, given my wife’s and my family commitments, I’d really like to work locally if possible.”

The narrative now clearly demonstrates a string of successes (experience in labs, completing several project assignments, a growing family) which lead to a development goal (“determine what industry most interests me over the long term”) and a need (“I’d really like to work locally”). And all this in four sentences!

Fourth, once you’ve crafted your narrative, the next step is to share it, in the course of meeting and getting to know your colleagues. Seek out informal opportunities to tell your story. A reflective moment sitting in the airport with a senior colleague or sharing a cab with a teammate are occasions when people might ask, “How’s everything going?” And when they do, they’ll be giving you a perfect opportunity to share your career narrative.

As you talk to more and more people, it will become increasingly likely that the kinds of conversations they’ll be having about you when you’re not in the room will work in your favor. Perhaps a senior exec will hear your story from one of his juniors and identify a development opportunity that perfectly fits your needs. Maybe a senior partner will hear about your set of skills and geographic constraints from one of your managers and offer you a perfect, local project assignment.

Finally, once developed, your narrative should never be set in stone. It needs to be regularly updated, as you achieve more and your needs change. Ensuring that senior staff understands the logic behind your career aspirations — and that they are not surprised by them — will go a long way toward maintaining top executives’ respect and support.

Sharing your personal narrative isn’t just good for you — it’s good for the people who hear it, too. As Heidi Gardner’s research on teams shows, an important factor that can depress team performance is a phenomenon known as “expertise dissensus” — that’s when team members who actually have markedly different views nevertheless think they all agree because they’ve made unwarranted assumptions about one another. By disseminating your story, you can give people a far more accurate view of who you are, which can avert potentially crippling coordination challenges, interpersonal friction, and misunderstandings down the road.

Too often, junior professionals rely on formal mechanisms for getting the word out about their achievements and needs — in particular, formal staffing processes, periodic performance reviews, and professional social networks. While these are all excellent resources in career development, they are rarely a match for the informal chatter that’s already going on in hallways, rental cars, and restaurants. By inserting your career narrative into those conversations, you can help ensure that when people talk about you — and they will talk about you — they’re saying the right things.

Welcome our new Ideas Editor, Helen Walters. We’re excited to have her around all the time; she’s been writing for TED.com, off and on, since 2007. Last year she was part of our marathon, can’t-stop-won’t-stop coverage of TED2012 and TEDGlobal 2012, where she wrote, in four days, 39,000 words. She’s nuts.

Formerly the editor of innovation and design at Bloomberg Businessweek, Helen blogs, tweets, writes, and talks about design at events around the world.

At TED, she’ll be working to connect our TED Talks videos with the wider world of ideas in print, on video and online — building an online context that lets ideas ping and prod each other with maximum effect.

Working with the computer all day long takes a toll on your eyes, unless you make the right calls to prevent the damage. Taking a pause from the display from time to time could improve your productivity at the office and prevent the deterioration of your vision.

However, I have yet to meet the user that remembers to take the time off the display at the right moment. E… (read more)

An edited interview with Robert Z. Lawrence, the Albert L. Williams Professor of International Trade and Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is the co-author of the 2012 Harvard Business Review article “Shattering the Myths About U.S. Trade Policy.”

President Obama emphasized reinvigorating American manufacturing in his State of the Union address, as well as boosting American exports. What do you make of his proposal?

The idea is important because we need demand in this economy in order to create jobs. Domestic demand is being constrained because our government is trying to get its fiscal house in order. Housing is depressed. Consumers are tapped out.

When you look around and ask where you get growth in this economy, one logical place to look is exports. That’s well chosen as an objective. But when it comes to achieving the goal of doubling exports in five years [a goal Obama outlined in his 2010 State of the Union speech], we already did the easy part: because our exports were so depressed due to the global financial crisis, we saw growth in the first couple of years. But if you look at the last year, global financial exports have been very disappointing. He’s not going to achieve his goal.

The real problem is slow growth in the rest of the world. At the end of the day, our exports are very dependent on two things, neither of which we have very good control over. The first is how rapidly our trading partners grow; a European crisis is not good for us. Slowdown in China and elsewhere is also not good for us.

The second big driver in our exports is our exchange rate — and not necessarily our exchange rate vis-à-vis China, which a lot of people point to. The truth is, we don’t actually compete much with China in our export markets; it’s mainly with the Europeans, the Canadians, the Japanese. We’re selling sophisticated machinery, and so are the Japanese and Europeans.

What about Obama’s emphasis on manufacturing and infrastructure?

The concrete thing I heard is that we want to improve our infrastructure, which is a good idea for a number of reasons — and it does raise costs to some degree for our exports. He also mentioned a plan for some sort of a stimulus to technological innovation, starting these manufacturing centers [like the one in Youngstown, Ohio].

That will make a contribution marginally, in my view. The real core questions are things like the way we tax companies. There is sort of a consensus that what we need to do is lower the corporate tax rate. In fact we have the worst of all worlds because we have a high tax rate at 35%, and then we give the firms a lot of deductions. At the margin, if you’re thinking about the next dollar, it’s going to be taxed at a high rate, and that discourages investment in the United States. And it discourages companies from bringing their money back to the United States.

It does seem to me that tax reform is a critical component of making ourselves more competitive.

He mentioned the tax code briefly in his speech, but do you think Obama has paid close enough attention to corporate tax reform in general?

This is an area where there could perhaps be a meeting of the minds between what the Republicans want and Obama wants. He has spoken about trying to get rid of the tax breaks that the oil companies get, for example. But I think we need a concrete proposal and leadership in that area. …

In an ideal world, what would that concrete plan look like?

You’re corporate tax rate would be 20, 25%, and then the allowances and all the special parts of the program that allow for deductions would be eliminated.

There’s also a very complex problem at the moment in the sense that companies keep their money abroad to escape U.S. taxation, and so that also needs to be confronted. Ideally, with a lower marginal rate, companies would have more incentive to bring it home, but you need to have some kind of program in place as well.

In your March 2012 HBR article, you unpack three myths about U.S. trade policy. Where do they sit now? Let’s start with the first myth: that an open trade policy is the cause of manufacturing job losses.

We’re still debating this one. … I really don’t think manufacturing is the answer to our jobs problem. We’ve done studies where we look and say, how many jobs are embodied in the trade deficit? And we get a number like 2 million. That sounds like a lot of jobs.

But we have something like 150 million people in the U.S. labor force. So even a resilient manufacturing sector will not make a huge difference to our employment problems. That can only be solved with stimulating total spending within the economy. Demand is deficient and you need a strategy to fix that.

And even if we see a revitalization of the manufacturing sector, basically it’s going to be built on high-tech and it’s going to require high-skilled workers. The workers who were displaced are not going to be the ones who are re-employed in manufacturing, by and large, unless they have those skills.

Obama says we need to educate people so they can work these high-skilled jobs. But is this push not really going to solve the problem?

I think that 90% of the new jobs are actually not going to be in manufacturing. Yes, people need to get skills, but they aren’t necessarily skills that are in manufacturing. What I missed in his speech was the strategy for the other 90% of the labor force.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against stimulating manufacturing and stimulating exports and so on. But a jobs strategy has to be based on aggregate demand throughout the economy.

If exports are the future, some of the jobs may well come in manufacturing. But a lot of them will be in services. One-third of all our exports are services. In fact, we don’t have a trade deficit in services. We’re highly competitive in services. But we’re still sort of looking in the rearview mirror when it comes to thinking about the structure of the economy.

While trade is part of the story, it’s a relatively small part of the story as compared with the combination of rapid productivity in the growth of manufacturing — which means we need fewer and fewer workers — and the productivity that brings down the price of goods. But consumers aren’t responsive enough to that falling price; what they do is that, when goods get cheaper, they buy services.

That’s the big issue that’s not recognized. Your iPhone got cheaper, but what did you do with your iPhone? You bought a whole lot of apps and paid Verizon for your telephone services. You’ve got a nice, big flat screen HD TV. But where’s your money going? It’s going to the cable company.

So the relative role of spending on goods is falling. Consumers are devoting more of their money to services. That’s just a fact of life.

What about the second myth: that U.S. standards of living are falling and wage inequality is rising because of competition from developing countries?

The big story in inequality in the United States, and particularly in the last five years, is not between skilled workers and unskilled workers. All workers are doing poorly compared to profits. The big story is profits.

Another part of the story is the incomes of the very wealthy. It’s a different kind of an inequality that you would expect if it was inequality based on competition with low-wage, emerging market economies.

I don’t think that the dominant source of that inequality is the global force. It may have something to do with it, but the bigger factor is that we have a deeply depressed economy and a deeply depressed labor market.

Then there’s the third myth: that growth in emerging markets like China and India are why we have higher oil prices?

I still think that the dominant story, if you take the big picture, is a failure of supply in developed countries to grow. And that is changing, particularly in respect to the U.S. We are moving much closer to becoming self-sufficient in oil.

Most Americans are worried about the high prices, and that won’t be solved by United States self-sufficiency. Even if we weren’t importing oil, our market would still be linked to the world market. If there’s some problem in the Middle East that leads to higher oil prices, prices would still rise in the United States for gasoline as well. Otherwise, Americans would just ship the oil out.

So we don’t buy protection from higher oil prices by being self-sufficient, but we do keep the money at home. And that’s a difference.

In a sign of Twitter’s ever-growing advertising ambitions, the company has hired Jeffrey Graham, a Googler and former New York Times executive, to run its ad research operations.

AdAge reported the news Friday morning. Twitter’s head of revenue, Adam Bain, announced it in a tweet:

Proud and excited to welcome @jeffrigram as our Director of @TwitterAds research!—
adam bain (@adambain) February 15, 2013

While Twitter already has a huge and sophisticated ad operation, the value it provides remains unclear to many brands and marketers. On Black Friday, for instance, a study reported that Twitter ads led to almost zero direct sales; Twitter’s value may considerably higher, however, if marketers consider other metrics like data or brand-awareness.

In his new job, it will likely fall to Graham to explain such distinctions. As AdAge notes, Twitter is forecast to take in over $500 million in revenue this year but will need a more finely-hewn product pitch to get to a billion. Graham is not a regular Twitter user (before today, his last one was in January about cats) but Friday morning he tweeted news of his hire and suggested the company’s acquisition of analytics firm Blue Fin will be a key part of its strategy:

So glad to join the flock and the incredible ad research team @twitter. @twitterads @adambain @joell @bluefinlabs Insights = Opportunity.

— Jeffrey Graham (@jeffrigram) February 15, 2013

Graham’s background is in agencies and, from 2007 to 2009, as a director of customer insight at the New York Times; in the latter position, he advised the publication on ad research and metrics. Most recently, he was head of ad research at Google but is joining a growing tide of people migrating to Twitter.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

Nintendo prides itself on making family friendly entertainment that anybody can enjoy. The Nintendo Wii was the best selling console in the last console generation largely due to it broad, casual appeal. That being said, a new study has found that the Wii may have been hiding a dark secret.

A study published last month in Mass Communication and Society looked to find if there was any correlation between hostility and the kind of controller being used while playing video games. The researchers at Mississippi State University found that players using a Wii remote and Nunchuck, combined with the physical activity required to play games using said controllers, led to increased hostility in players.

What game could the subjects possibly be playing on the Wii to lead to such hostility? As it turns out, the researchers chose Punch-Out!! as their game of choice. It’s a boxing game that’s very similar to the boxing game in Wii Sports. If you’ve played either, you know that you actually work up quite the sweat while playing these games. It’s no wonder that players become more hostile by swinging fists at the air.

Some gamers may be concerned that this study will only add to the perception that video games cause violent behavior, despite having no evidence backing up such claims. The good news is that it doesn’t as the research found that hostility was increased by a small amount during a 10-minute session. The researchers say they didn’t test long-term play, but I would assume you’d get more tired than hostile after playing Punch-Out!! for an hour.

What may be more interesting to gamers is that the study also looked at how controllers impact identification and presence. As in, which controllers allow players to relate better with the characters on screen. It found that motion-based controls increased both of these feelings in players, but found that they don’t necessarily create a feeling of immersion into the game’s environment.

You can find the full study here.

[h/t: Phys.org]

Twitter’s Vine app asked users to send them some creative Valentine’s Day-themed Vine videos, and said that the best ones would get a retweet:

Roses are red. Violets are blue. Tweet us your favorite #valenvine posts. We’ll RT a few.

— Vine (@vineapp) February 14, 2013

Here are the four that they felt were worthy of that honor. Considering Vine’s little run in with the NSFW territory, we’re not surprised that they’re a little tame.

Rome and Juliet. We tried #valenvine #cnnvalentine #loop #vinekids #cute vine.co/v/brMuWZgrxbK

— Amy Johnson (@makermama) February 14, 2013

@vineapp I drew a real heart vine.co/v/brAeHaWb9Hx #valenvine

— Ben Rowell (@scienceben) February 14, 2013

@vineappHappy Valentines day! I vined chocolate for daughter. Please check it,thank you.vine.co/v/brzIBFj1HqU#valenvine

— *maho/まほりーぬ (@maholine) February 14, 2013

Happy valentines #valenvine vine.co/v/brMraJq2aW3

— London Lazerson (@londonlaz) February 14, 2013

And here are few more that we spotted:

I made my wife a wee film for #valentines. Aye it’s cheesy, but it’s a practical SFX masterpiece. vine.co/v/brJgtOPMLDr

— David Galletly (@davidgalletly) February 15, 2013

Amazing! RT @ryanhopkinson: Happy anti-valentine’s day #DazedVine vine.co/v/brKa2TxwhVz

— Dazed and Confused (@DazedMagazine) February 14, 2013

#CNNValentine vine.co/v/bvOPjP2WpWh

— Stewart Scott-Curran (@stewartsc) February 11, 2013

Kris Humphries, who has been locked in a legal battle with ex-wife Kim Kardashian for over a year now as the two try to finalize their divorce, is facing another setback in the case after his attorney Marshall Waller filed a motion to be removed as his legal counsel.

Citing “irreconcilable differences”, Waller petitioned the court to quit the case right before a hearing based on Kardashian’s request to get a court date set as soon as possible. It’s not clear yet what those differences may be, but it’s possible Waller just wants to move on from the case that won’t die.

The famous couple were married just 72 days before splitting, with Humphries claiming that Kim orchestrated their relationship and elaborate wedding just for ratings for her immensely popular reality show, “Keeping Up With The Kardashians”. Since Kim broke the news that she’s now pregnant with rapper Kanye West’s baby, the legal drama has reached an all-time high, with reports that Humphries could legally claim the baby as his own and speculation that Humphries has deliberately been delaying the case in order to get some sort of revenge.

Depending on today’s court date, this may not be over for a while. Kim is due to give birth in July.

As technology expands the way that marketing is understood, led, and practiced, there are exciting new opportunities for Chief Marketing Officers and Chief Information Officers to drive growth by collaborating and transforming their organizations. For example, in a more interconnected and intelligent world, marketers can use social media technology to deepen their connection with customers, employees, and citizens.

In this HBR webinar, C-level marketing and technology experts from the Cleveland Clinic discuss how leaders are partnering to transform their organizations and take advantage of the immense opportunities in their radically changing markets.

Google has hired NASA Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell, saying he will be working on “high-reliability” software.

We’re happy to welcome Mars rover driver Scott Maxwell to Google! He’ll be working on high-reliability software: goo.gl/6MbJH

— Life at Google (@googlejobs) February 15, 2013

Maxwell announced the news himself in a Google+ post on Saturday in which he called Google “perhaps my favorite company — not perfect, as no company (or person) can be, but very very good.”

“They’re also famous for their employee perks, which will be nice, but there was something that was far more important to me,” he added. “Google’s company mantra, as you might know, is ‘Don’t be evil.’ So both times I interviewed there, I asked every single person I talked to — a couple of dozen people in total — this question: ‘Is that ‘Don’t be evil’ stuff just something they worry about at the higher levels and not part of your life, or does it filter down to you?’”

Every person he talked to, he says, had a story when they had to choose between doing something that would make Google more money (but be evil) and something that would make the company less money (but not be evil), and that everyone chose the “non-evil” path every time. According to Maxwell’s account, these Googlers were always supported, or even rewarded for their choices.

Maxwell continued, “And I said to myself, these are people with integrity and a company with integrity — a company that has made sure to bake that integrity into its very DNA, all the way down to their lowest-level engineers, as insurance that it will keep itself honest (And there’s more: for example, they’ve encrypted user data and made it off-limits even to their own employees without several layers of authorization — and they’ve done it quietly, not for publicity, just because it’s the right thing to do.) This is a place I want to be. This is a place where I will feel at home.”

Maxwell starts his job at Google on March 4th.

Last week, Red Thread Games Kickstarted the sequel and finale to its The Longest Journey series.

The developers promised to create Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey, a new tale featuring protagonist Zoë Castillo. The game will supposedly feature three different playable characters, a 3D point-and-click interface, and an “interactive and living world” that combines bits of cyberpunk and “magical fantasy.”

This week, with over 90% of the $850,000 goal funded, Red Thread has updated the game’s Kickstarter page and provided a more in-depth look at the early development of Chapters. The new video features developers showing off a playable version of the game. Though the already looks servicable, Red Thread was quick to preface the video with the statement that the gameplay and graphics shown are from a very early prototype version of the game and “does not reflect the final quality of the art, animations, frame-rate, or UI.”

In a continued bid to gain enterprise market share for storage, Amazon Web Services (AWS) officially launched Redshift, a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. The company announced the service late last year with a limited preview by invitation only. The service is now available in U.S. East (Northern Virginia), with plans to expand to other AWS Regions in the coming months.

AWS built Redshift based on technology licensed from Paraccel, of which Amazon is an investor.

Impact on the Marketplace

With Redshift, Amazon is taking on established offerings from Oracle, IBM and Teradata, and it’s challenging them on cost. At its re: Invent conference in November, AWS presented the pay-as-you-go incentive, calculating that it would cost between $19,000 and $25,000 per terabyte per year at list prices to build and run a good-sized data warehouse on premise.

Redshift is a good example of AWS working harder to provide an enterprise-friendly service. The Redshift service follows AWS Glacier, which provides low cost cold storage/archive storage with the tradeoff that archives aren’t available instantaneously. The company also recently unveiled high memory instances. It appears that Amazon is going hard after enterprise data on a variety of fronts, and with Redshift, it’s expanding into the big data marketplace.

Ease of Use

Users can manage Redshift from the AWS Management Console. It includes a variety of graphs and visualizations to monitor the status and performance of clusters, as well as the resources consumed by each query. Customers can resize clusters, add or remove nodes, change instance type, create a snapshot, restore the snapshot to a new cluster, within the console through a couple of clicks.

Redshift offers fast-query performance when analyzing virtually any size data set using the same SQL-based tools and business intelligence applications that are in use today. The company says it designed Redshift to be cost-effective, easy to use, and flexible. Redshift is anticipated to deliver 10 times the performance at one-tenth the cost of on-premise data warehouses. This is achieved through columnar data storage, advanced compression, and high-performance disk and network I/O.

Redshift integrates with a number of other AWS services, including S3 and Amazon DynamoDB. Customers can also use the AWS Data Pipeline to load data from Amazon RDS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and Amazon EC2 data sources.

Users can start out small (in terms of data warehousing, a couple of hundred gigabytes) and scale up as needed.

Pricing

• High Storage Extra Large (15 GiB of RAM, 4.4 ECU, and 2 TB of local attached compressed user data) goes for $0.85 per hour

• High Storage Eight Extra Large (120 GiB of RAM, 35 ECU, and 16 TB of local attached user data) for $6.80 per hour.

With either instance type, customers pay an effective price of $3,723 per terabyte per year for storage and processing. One-Year and Three-Year Reserved Instances are also available, pushing the annual cost per terabyte down to $2,190 and $999, respectively.

Keep up on Data Center Knowledge’s cloud computing coverage, check the Cloud Computing channel.

Young-ha Kim has a simple message for us all: get out there and create some art. Are you getting tense, just from the suggestion?

Young-ha Kim: Be an artist, right now!

In today’s talk, given at TEDxSeoul and TED’s first ever in Korean, Kim says, “You think, ‘I’m too busy. I don’t have time for art.’ There are hundreds of reasons why we can’t be artists right now. Don’t they just pop into your head? … Perhaps you think art is for the gifted or for the professional trained. Or perhaps you think you’ve strayed too far from art.”

When we were kids, says Kim, we were constantly creating art — drawing on the wall, making up dances, singing nonsense lyrics, putting on plays for our family, making up stories, building sandcastles. But as we get older, this impulse dulls. Not only because we hear judgment from others, but because we start taking formal lessons and it becomes less about having fun and more about doing something well.

“Art is about going a little nuts … Kids do art for fun. It’s playing,” he says. “If you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you’ll increasingly feel pressure. People will question your actions.”

So what happens? According to Kim, we suppress our artistic spirit. We learn to be critics, rather than taking the risk of making. Kim calls us “dictators with a remote control,“ yelling at the people on reality-TV dance and singing competitions for a flat note.

To hear more about this tragedy — and what we can do to overcome it — watch this hilarious talk. An especially amazing image in it: Kim writing fast and furious, so that the artistic devil cannot catch him and fill his head with doubts.

Young-ha Kim is one of the most popular writers of his generation in Korea. The author of five novels, four short story collections and numerous essays, Kim’s work mixes high and low genres and focuses on the meaning of Korean identity in increasingly globalized world.

How popular is Kim in Korea? Not only has he won many a literary award, but two of his books have been turned into feature films with a third on the way. In fact, at the Jeonju International Film Festival taking place in spring 2013, there will be an entire program of short films based on Young-ha Kim’s short stories. Fans have even created “Kim Young-ha Bingo,” where you read 50 pages of any of his works and mark off the themes he touches on in those pages — from art references to paranoia.

Here, some excerpts from Kim’s works, to get you better acquainted with this writer. Even though he is more interested in making sure you start typing than read what he’s created.

From his debut book, I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

I’m looking at Jacques-Louis David’s 1793 oil painting, “The Death of Marat,” printed in an art book. The Jacobin revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat lies murdered in his bath. His head is wrapped in a towel, like a turban, and his hand, draped alongside the tub, holds a pen. Marat has expired — bloodied — nestled between the colors of white and green. The work exudes calm and quiet. You can almost hear a requiem. The fatal knife lies abandoned at the bottom of the canvas.

I’ve already tried to make a copy of this painting several times. The most difficult part is Marat’s expression; he always comes out looking too sedate. In David’s Marat, you can see neither the dejection nor the relief of the man who has escaped life’s suffering. His Marat is peaceful but pained, filled with hatred but also with understanding. Through a dead man’s expression David manages to realize all of our conflicting innermost emotions. Read more »

Marilyn Monroe and Lady Gaga’s Korea (excerpted from Words without Borders)

Marilyn Monroe came to South Korea in February of 1954. While honeymooning in Tokyo with Joe DiMaggio, she had boarded a military plane and was en route to Seoul even before the marriage was fully consummated. At the airport, she was swarmed by hundreds of GIs who had been awaiting her arrival. When she came down the gangway, Monroe was dressed in a flight suit. Reporters noted that “half of the buttons on the top were undone, offering tantalizing glimpses of her chest, which got the troops even more riled up.” According to Korean news reports from the time, the GIs were disappointed to see her immediately board a helicopter bound for the frontlines and asked her when she would return, to which she “turned on the charm like a mother comforting a child” and replied, “I’ll be right back.”

By February of 1954, the Korean War, which had lasted for three years, had already been brought to an end under the pretext of a ceasefire, but tens of thousands of American soldiers were still stationed in South Korea. Monroe gave dozens of performances, visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals, and posed on top of tanks. In archival photos, the soldiers’ excitement as they greet her is palpable. In colorless, dirt-covered barracks, Monroe alone stands out in color, as if someone had come along later and Photoshopped her into the pictures. Before thousands of soldiers seated on a low hill devoid of even a single tree, she spreads her arms wide and sings in time with a piano. The images look like they could have come from a 1960s rock festival. Read the rest of the essay »

From his latest book, Black Flower

With his head thrust into the swamp filled with swaying weeds, many things swarmed before Ijeong’s eyes. All were pieces of the scenery of Jemulpo that he thought he had long ago forgotten. Nothing had disappeared: the flute-playing eunuch, the fugitive priest, the spirit-possessed shaman with the turned-in teeth, the girl who smelled of roe deer blood, the poor members of the royal family, the starving discharged soldiers, even the revolutionary’s barber — they all waited for Ijeong with smiling faces in front of the Japanese-style building on the hill in Jemulpo.

How could all of these things be so vivid with closed eyes? Ijeong was mystified. He opened his eyes and everything disappeared. A booted foot pushed on the nape of his neck, shoving his head deep into the bottom of the swamp. Foul water and plankton rushed into his lungs. Read more »

Ice Cream (excerpted from the Asia Literary Review)

“Can you smell the petrol?” Mina asked him. Eugene tilted his end.

“I’m not sure, but something’s off.”

“C’mon, we’ve been eating these bars for ages.”

“This one doesn’t taste right. I’m telling you, it stinks of petrol.” She was already washing her mouth out. Eugene put the remainder of the ice-cream bar in his mouth. “Are you nuts?!” she cried. He ignored her, swirling it around with his tongue, trying to detect the smell. He then spat out the mouthful.

“You’re right. It does smell like petrol.”

It all began when the International Monetary Fund seized control of South Korea like an occupying army. The football team were hopeless, the economy desperate and the entire nation felt as if it were on its last legs. Read the rest of the story »

The Man Who Sold His Shadow (excerpted from Words without Borders)

Here’s a question we all ask ourselves at least once when we’re young: Where does that starlight come from? It’s been there before I was born, and before my grandmother, and her grandmother were born. So just how far is that star from Earth? The curiosity of children is insatiable. They’ll grab a flashlight and aim it at the stars and think, “This light will get there someday, won’t it? When I’m dead, and my grandchildren are gone, and their grandchildren as well.” Whimsical thoughts, of course. Not a chance that light so faint will still be sparkling thousands of light-years from now. That’s our universe: a place where light much stronger than this vanishes without a trace.

And another childish question: Does a bird in mid-flight have a shadow? How can such a small, light thing be burdened by something as clumsy as a shadow? But birds certainly do have a shadow. Sometimes, just sometimes, when I watch a flock fly by I have a feeling that something dark and black is flitting past. It’s subtle enough that you’ll miss it if you’re not fully concentrating on it. When the moon covers the sun, we have a solar eclipse. What do you call it when birds do that? Read the rest of the story »

Honor Killing (a story on a napkin in Esquire)

She was twenty-one, with fair, beautiful skin. Even when bare, her face glowed, always radiant and dewy. This was precisely why the dermatologist’s office hired her as the receptionist. Her job was simple. All she had to do was write down the patients’ names, tell them in a friendly voice, “please take a seat until we call your name,” find their charts, and hand them over to the nurses. Her glowing, translucent skin created high expectations, encouraging the patients to pour their trust in the office, which bustled with a sudden increase in patients. Read the second paragraph of this very short story »

Gracenote officially unveiled its developer program at Music Hack Day San Francisco, giving developers access to a number of APIs and SDKs as well as its mobile client to jump-start the development of new music apps.

Developers can make use of these resources to identify music through audio fingerprinting, access additional metadata about music and even retrieve the cover art for CDs. Gracenote’s music database contains information about a total of 130 million songs, which are classified by more than 2,000 musical genres.

“The company has a history of supporting innovation,” Gracenote President Stephen White said during a phone interview Thursday. Gracenote’s original CD database used to offer developers free access for non-commercial applications, but White said that Gracenote moved away from some of these principles when the company got acquired by Sony. Now Gracenote wants to reclaim its place in the music tech developer ecosystem.

Gracenote’s developer program soft launched at the Stockholm Music Hack Day last month, and 300 developers have already signed up to make use of the company’s resources. One of them is an iOS app called Stream That Song that uses Gracenote’s music recognition to identify a song that’s playing in the background (think Shazam) and then adds it to a user’s Spotify or Deezer library.

Resources of the program are limited to non-commercial app development. White argued that this gives developers a chance to start working on their app and apply for a commercial license once it’s proven to be successful. “There’s no need to strike licenses before you start working,” he said.

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BitTorrent is launching a new tool to send large files from person to person: The software, dubbed SoShare, allows users to share file bundles of up to 1 TB for free. SoShare combines BitTorrent file transfer technology with cloud caching, making it possible for recipients to access the files even when the sender is offline.

SoShare keeps copies of files available for up to 30 days, unless a user opts to take them down beforehand. Users need to install a plugin to upload or download files, but it’s not necessary to register in order to access shared files.

BitTorrent launched a first alpha version of SoShare a year ago under the name Share. While testing Share, it discovered that photographers, videographers and musicians were most in need for this kind of service. “No one is designing media delivery for the media industry. We saw an opportunity to build a reliable solution for this user group,” said Catherine Meek, Director of Product Management at BitTorrent, adding:

“There are 3.34 million Americans employed in creative industries. They work in large file formats – photo, audio, film. And their work is dependent on being able to send and deliver these large file formats to collaborators and clients. Right now, doing so is costly and difficult.”

Speaking of costs: SoShare is absolutely free during its public beta test, but a BitTorrent spokesperson told me that the company may be looking at different options to monetize the service down the line.

SoShare is one of a number of new products developed by BitTorrent as parts of its BitTorrent Labs effort. Just last month, BitTorrent announced a new file syncing app that competes with traditional syncing services like Dropbox and Sugarsync.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Carlos Maya.

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People really seem to be enjoying this new ad from Chevy, uploaded to YouTube a few days ago. YouTube has it in the “Trending Topics” right alongside things like the ever-popular Harlem Shake and Asteroid 2012 Da14. Given how much these other things are being talked about, that’s a pretty good start for an advertising campaign.

It should probably be noted that the ad is currently featured on the front page of YouTube, as an actual ad. Still the comments on the video are overwhelmingly positive.

It’s the most tragic and heartbreaking thing a mother can imagine: learning there’s something wrong with her baby in utero. When Claire Ives was seven months pregnant, she got the terrible news that her son’s heartbeat was going at a rate of twice the normal number of beats, and was forced to deliver him five weeks early.

Baby Edward was born with supraventricular tachycardia, a condition that causes improper electrical impulses in the heart and leads to an irregular heartbeat. The end result is that the heart can overwork itself and stop, or organs which aren’t getting enough blood flow begin to malfunction.

Not long after he was born, Edward’s heart began to race the way it had in the womb, and doctors tried shocking it and administering medication, to no avail. The infant was given just a 5% chance of survival.

“I just thought he was going to die,” said Ives.

When nothing else worked, doctors turned to an unconventional method for a patient so young; cooling him with gel ice packs to slow his heart rate and protect his organs. His body temperature was dropped to just 91 degrees, and over the span of several days, a team of doctors and nurses stood close watch over the baby as his heartrate continued to spike up and down. Eventually, by using a combination of the cooling method and medication, they got his heart rate to remain stable. A full ten days after he was delivered, Claire got to hold her baby boy for the first time. Edward is now six months old and appears to be fine.

“It was horrible to see him lying there freezing in nothing but a nappy,” Claire Ives said. “He was heavily sedated so didn’t move much, and he was cold to touch – it looked like he was dead. All I wanted to do was scoop him up and give him a warm cuddle. I just had to keep reminding myself that it was saving his life.”

Though Edward will have to be monitored as he gets older to ensure the condition doesn’t return, the family says they are extremely grateful that science was on their side when it mattered most.

“It’s made me appreciate all the small things about my children,” said Ives. ”It’s the best thing ever to bring him home.”

Image: Caters

Earlier this week, Namco Bandai released an action-packed trailer for the upcoming Star Trek video game based on the rebooted J.J. Abrams movie franchise. It appeared to imitate

A new look at the game released today shows that the game won’t be completely a cover-based shooter (though it still appears much of it will be). Brian Miller, SVP at Paramount Pictures narrates the video and talks a bit about the co-op aspect of the game that allows players to take on the role of both Kirk and Spock.

It turns out that the co-op characters will have different play styles and abilities. While Kirk focuses on honing his phaser skills and appears to play very similarly to a Mass Effect 3 Commander Shepherd, Spock is able to use stealth and perform Vulcan nerve pinch takedowns to defuse situations.

Since the game is scheduled to come out on April 23 – one month before the release of Star Trek Into Darkness – Star Trek fans shouldn’t expect it to have any spoilers about the upcoming movie. There will be plenty of Gorn blasting, though. Also, if the the developers have any sense they will have included a crafting system that allows players to create their own Gorn cannon.

It’s still unknown whether the Star Trek video game will be fun or a classic thrown-together movie tie-in. The animations and graphics don’t seem spectacular, but the ability to stealthily perform a Vulcan nerve pinch is at least evidence that there will be one good thing in the game.