Culture

My Mentor, My Duck; Five Photos, Five Stories

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Can a duck be a mentor? To creatures other than other ducks?

If you are reading this on a Windows browser, there should be a logo on left side of the tab at top, a little green-brown-yellow blob. I first placed it there as an inside joke with myself, but the story is worth sharing. The full-size photo is at the top. (Most of this first appeared in a post from December 2013, “A Duck About Town.”)

It is a photo of a duck. My mentor.
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#KeepIt100: ‘The Nightly Show,’ Starring Me

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Oh my God, it’s Fareed Zakaria,” I whispered to Jen, my girlfriend. It is possible that Mr. Zakaria goes days between hearing something like that from non-famous people; it is possible that he can leave his house without a pen because he can expect a day without autograph requests.

I am a lifelong news junkie and talk show viewer, so in my world, Fareed Zakaria is very famous. He was one of the guest panelists Thursday night on “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,” which Jen and I watched get made. Because I attended that taping and was in the audience for one of the last episodes of “The Colbert Report” in September, I thought it would be worth comparing the two experiences—”The Colbert Report” was very professional and “The Nightly Show” was not as professionally run, but this was okay. “Keep it 100,” as he would say.
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Schadenfreude and Other Tongue-Twisters

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The term schadenfreude literally means damage-joy. When one enjoys the news that a rival is encountering trouble, one is experiencing a sense of schadenfreude. Most of us have experienced this feeling at some point in our lives, but most of us also have been jerks at some point in our lives, and the two sometimes come at the same time.

There is no real-world term for its opposite, so some people have begun to use a made-up word, freudenschade, to describe the distress one feels when a friend or rival is doing well or has had a success.

And then there are some people, I am thinking of the late Gore Vidal here, who appear to take pleasure at others’ distress at one’s success. Vidal confessed to feelings of schadenfreude over other writers’ freudenschade. (That is as hard to type as it is to say.)
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