What would you recommend as the best way for an actuary to break into show business?  

A. Morri
Lynnwood, WA

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Approach it rationally, consulting the statistics ---- the ethnic background, education, geographic origins, of people successful in show business and their age, height, and weight when they broke into the business ---- and what you'll find is that you're too old and too well-educated to go into show business and you should be happy right where you are.

Hi GK,

My husband and I and our two children (ages 5 and 7) are facing difficult financial times (I know, we're not alone). To avoid a possible foreclosure on our home, we are selling it and moving back in with my mother temporarily.  My mother is sweet and caring but can be a bit noisy and interfering when it comes to my children.  Do you have any words of wisdom (or encouragement) for a woman who will surely be losing her mind shortly (my mother can drive me crazy)?

Apprehensive in Texas,
Christy 

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This is your advanced course in social skills, Christy, and it will make you an even better person than the fine person you are. As a guest in your mother's home, you surrender a degree of adult autonomy and you must respect that it is her home and you must yield to her authority. No shrieking, no door slamming, none of that. If you're angry, slip quietly away and take a brisk walk and curse to yourself. Passive resistance can be a good technique, and also Killing With Kindness, or Extreme Courtesy. You need to be protective of your husband, whose feelings are delicate in this situation, and you need to protect your children from family conflict. But your mother has to have the right to direct and discipline young children in her own home if you aren't present and maybe even if you are. You have to respect her standards in her home: it'll be a good lesson for the kids to understand this. Expect the best and ignore the worst and you stand a better chance. This is a story that demands a heroine and you're her. Simple as that.

When I was 25, my young wife and I lived for a couple months in her parents' basement and her mother was a tower of kindness. St. Marjory. And when you're back on your feet and in your own place, you'll look back on this as a remarkable chapter in your family's life.

How should a young would-be journalist go about these days, in the face of dwindling newspaper circulation, fierce competition and unstoppable feelings of hopelessness?

-David Haydon
Houston

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Newspapers are failing because there's so little in them that anybody wants to read. Travelling around the country, I pick up once-proud newspapers in airports and am astonished at how thin they are, how publishers are cutting out the very things that give them life. It's like trying to cure a sick patient by bleeding him. What a young journalist needs to do is to put together enough money to take two years to see the world. There are readers who want to buy your stuff but first you have to find out what you can do. A young journalist has the big advantages of youth ---- curiosity, the freedom to ramble, the ability to meet physical challenges and to endure hardship ---- and you should use them to give yourself a big experience. Go walk around China, go explore India, live in Alaska, do big things, develop your sensibility, your narrative skills, your view of the world. This is not frivolous. This is essential to building a professional career. The reader needs to get some report from the distant world. He is firmly imprisoned in his own life. He needs you to be free in his behalf. This would be a good time to learn how to do that.