Author name: Dan Pink

Frauenmangel. (Definition: The lack of women.) According to this Economist story, it’s a problem afflicting eastern Germany. “In some towns there are only 75 young women for every 100 young men. In one or two there are as few as 40.”

That’s the lede of this Reuters story about Japan’s “Nobel Prize for manga,” which was awarded to Hong Kong’s Lee Chi Ching, author of Sun Zi’s Tactics (shown here.) One of the judges was the legendary Machiko Satonaka, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing back in May.

I’m a sucker for lists. And today, thanks to some odd cosmic convergence, I came across a pair I really like. The first is Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule (great book, btw) Bob Sutton’s “15 Things I Believe.” (You’ll find it looking at the left-hand column of this link and scrolling

PricewaterhouseCoopers says Americans will soon spend more money on videogames than on music. The rest of the world already devotes more of its shekels to games than to tunes.

In a new report on U.S. charitable donations, Charity USA says “About 65 percent of households with incomes lower than $100,000 give to charity. That is higher than the percentage who vote or read a Sunday newspaper.” Excellent example of what makes America so different from the rest of the world.

1. Freegans — “scavengers of the developed world, living off consumer waste in an effort to minimize their support of corporations and their impact on the planet, and to distance themselves from what they see as out-of-control consumerism.” (Source: NY Times, 6/21/07) 2. Precariat workers — “a new Japanese word combining the English words ‘precarious,’

Marc Andreessen says this and several other interesting things in this provocative post about how he hires talent. (HT: Jeremy Epstein)

A friend of mine is putting together a list of the world’s coolest quotations on design. Do you have a quote that’s your favorite? Words that hang above your desk or lolls in your sig file? A few phrases that motivate, challenge, provoke, or inspires whenever you read them? If so, feel free to send

Yesterday was my daughters’ last day of school. In their honor, here’s a trio of education factoids that just came over the transom from the U.S. Census Bureau. 100%: Percentage of public schools with Internet access (Source, Table 246) 1.1 million: Number of U.S. students who are home-schooled. (Source, table 227) 56%: Percentage of U.S.

Some say America is losing its IT edge and ought to look northward for guidance. As this IT World story puts it: “American schools would do well to emulate Canadian universities such as McGill and Waterloo, which, without a doubt, are North America’s leading source of top IT talent,” said [IT guru Thornton] May. Apart