Tolstoy

The How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia author adopted Murakami's philosophy of prioritizing physical fitness in order to maximize creativity—and reaped the benefits.

Here's how to get a writer's body in seven days. Spend hours hunched over a keyboard in low light, exercising nothing but your eyelids and your finger muscles. Subsist on coffee, cigarettes, and the occasional croissant. Drink no water; whiskey's better. Look up at your heroes on the wall: sickly, malnourished, funny-looking people who died of lupus and liver failure on the hot trail of the truth.

We could use more separation between work and life. Are you sure working from home is such a good idea?

I completely get the utopian fantasy of working from home: the baby napping in his crib in the next room, the gold light filtering in through the window, a tagine made with vegetables from the farmers market simmering on the stove, while you are answering emails and brainstorming ideas, the dream of modern connected life. But is that the way it really works out?

All happy Kindle Fire customers, to paraphrase Tolstoy, are the same. Unhappy customers, however, are unhappy in their own way. To get a feel for what makes them unhappy—and how unhappy they are—we spent some time Saturday morning reading the Kindle Fire feedback on Amazon.com. There were 3,678 write-ups in all, nearly half of them (47%) glowing five-star reviews that basically said the same thing (Typical headline: "Outstanding value at $199"). What interested us, however, were the 491 (13.3%) one-star reviews.