March 2012
45 posts
How the Internet Is Making States Poor →
February 2012
59 posts
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The Caging of America →
Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands
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Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy... →
I asked whether something analogous happened in fiction: was a beautiful sentence more likely to be true in some way? McCarthy laughed. “That’s tough. It’s hard to define beauty, though there’ve been some strange attempts. We know it involves harmony, repetition, symmetry. These things speak to us and have for a long time.”
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How thick is your bubble? →
A quiz by Charles Murray from his book Coming Apart to show how in-tune you are with most of America.
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Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? →
“Nobody took into account that diamonds, like any other commodity, can drop in value,” Mark Mosevics, chairman of First International Bank of Israel, explained to The New York Times. According to industry estimates, the average one-carat flawless diamond had fallen in value by 50 percent since January of 1980. In March of 1980, for example, the benchmark value for such a diamond was...
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E-books Can’t Burn →
Certainly there were those who lamented the loss of calligraphy when the printing press made type impersonal. There were some who believed that serious readers would always prefer serious books to be copied by hand.
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The Possibilian →
One of the seats of emotion and memory in the brain is the amygdala, he explained. When something threatens your life, this area seems to kick into overdrive, recording every last detail of the experience. The more detailed the memory, the longer the moment seems to last. “This explains why we think that time speeds up when we grow older,” Eagleman said—why childhood summers seem to go on...
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Muscle Beach and the Dawn of Huge →
Muscle, in all its meanings, is such a deeply American trope that it feels like part of our national narrative.
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The Business of Bookmarking →
An interesting and refreshingly honest look into a “small business owner” on the web.
Right versus pragmatic →
In The Big Lebowski, the Dude says, “You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.”
There’s a pretty good lesson to be learned from that. Sometimes you’re right, and insisting that you’re right never makes you wrong, but it doesn’t solve the problem.
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Teller Reveals His Secrets →
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Mind vs. Machine →
The apparent implication is that—because technological evolution seems to occur so much faster than biological evolution (measured in years rather than millennia)—once the Homo sapiens species is overtaken, it won’t be able to catch up. Simply put: the Turing Test, once passed, is passed forever. I don’t buy it.
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Envisioning a Post-Campus America →
6. Young job-seekers will need new ways to signal diligence. I’d expect to see a lot of free labor in the early years, something like what aspiring writers and visual artists already do with their blogs. There will be more freelancing, more try-out employment, and more unpaid internships.
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In Defense of Liz Lemon →
That was why the show worked: it rarely made Liz an empowering role model, although many women certainly identified with her. The show let her be the George Costanza, not the Mary Richards. And, refreshingly, this appeal had little to do with sex or relationships: a lot of it was about her job.
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The Great Illusion of Gettysburg →
The cyclorama re-created the Battle of Gettysburg in stunning realism, with impeccable attention to the smallest minutiae. Yet it offered not a single clue as to why the battle had been fought. No matter how hard they looked, or how long they stared, no visitor would find in the painting any trace of the cause of the war. There was carnage. There was valor. But there was no purpose.
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Misfortune Teller →
What, precisely, did Buck’s lawyers say the expert did wrong? He testified that blacks are more likely to commit violence.
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Locked in the Ivory Tower: Why JSTOR Imprisons... →
Step back and think about this picture. Universities that created this academic content for free must pay to read it. Step back even further. The public — which has indirectly funded this research with federal and state taxes that support our higher education system — has virtually no access to this material, since neighborhood libraries cannot afford to pay those subscription...
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What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies →
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The Real Crisis in College Sports: It's Wasted... →
As the Times notes, a recent study at the University of Oregon found that men’s grades dropped when the school’s football team had a winning season. But that’s just one (as-of-yet unpublished) study. There is also evidence that a successful college sports team can help boost graduation rates by fostering a stronger campus community and that winning on the field might increase...
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Method actors →
Presti’s gift has been his ability to sift through vast amounts of information and weed out the most important data points. Analytics is more than just numbers — it is, quite literally, the study of analysis. And from advanced stats to detailed scouting reports, from psychological evaluations to face-to-face meetings, Presti wants all the info he can find, because he knows how much...
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The Talent Society →
On the other hand, people who lack social capital are more likely to fall through the cracks. It takes effort, organization and a certain set of skills to surf these new, protean social networks. People who are unable to make the effort or lack social capital are more likely to be alone. As Klinenberg and others have shown, this is especially likely to happen to solitary middle-aged men, who are...
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Third Grade Again: The Trouble With Holding... →
“It seems like legislators are absolutely ignorant of the research, and the research is amazingly consistent that holding kids back is detrimental,” Berliner said. “Everybody supports the idea that if a student isn’t reading well in third grade that it’s a signal that the child needs help. If you hold them back, you’re going to spend roughly another $10,000...
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A Question of Identity →
This much is clear: We still haven’t figured out how to talk about Asian Americans. The term “model minority” has long since expired, for good reason, but the nerdy kid who, through hard work and natural intelligence, pulls himself into good standing still remains the dominant narrative. For the most part, that’s how Jeremy Lin has been processed. He’s described as...
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Living by Default →
Of course, many borrowers made bad decisions and acted irresponsibly. But so did lenders—by handing out too much money and not requiring sensible down payments.
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What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? →
This doesn’t mean that adolescents are stupider than they used to be. In many ways, they are much smarter. An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school, and there is even some...
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Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain →
The new study found no evidence for one piece of conventional wisdom: that having a good teacher in an early grade has a bigger effect than having a good teacher in later grades.
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Not Fade Away: Against the Myth of American... →
Did the fundamentals of America’s relative power shift so dramatically in just a few short years?
The answer is no. Let’s start with the basic indicators. In economic terms, and even despite the current years of recession and slow growth, America’s position in the world has not changed. Its share of the world’s GDP has held remarkably steady, not only over the past decade but over the past...
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Space, Time and DVR Mechanics →
In theory, I should be able to enjoy every single game I want to see, on my own schedule — all I need to do is avoid the Internet for a few hours and not glance at the ESPN ticker on public TV screens. But it never works: I get home, I start watching the recent past, and I find myself rushing toward the present.
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My Struggle With ADD: Using Cocaine to Fight the... →
Of course, no medication will rid a person of their ADD; as treatment, the chemical effects are corrective, not curative.
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'Plug In Better': A Manifesto →
Or we can consider a more encouraging possibility: we plug back in because we like it. We plug back in because this new online world offers extraordinary opportunities for creation, discovery, and connection. We plug back in because we don’t actually want to escape the online world: We want to help create it.
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We Don't Need a Digital Sabbath, We Need More Time →
At the core of the changes isn’t merely that we can measure time more precisely, but that we actually divide time into smaller and smaller pieces. In his landmark 1965 12-country time-diary study, German sociologist Erwin Scheuch found that the more industrialized a country became, the more activities its people crammed into a 24-hour period. He called this phenomenon time-deepening,...
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The Myth of the Middle →
It’s certainly not wrong to see the deficit battles of 2011 as emblematic of the failure of our politics. But the budget deficit itself has several other causes: the economic downturn, demographics, health-care cost inflation. It’s hard to imagine that a president who cares even more about the deficit than Barack Obama does (Obama was willing to alienate much of his own party in pursuit of a...
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Obama, Explained →
And for those who supported him the first time, as I did? To me, the evidence suggests that given a second term, he would have a better chance of becoming the figure so many people imagined.
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Are Depressions Necessary? →
The co-op allowed couples with young children to have babysitters for nights out in return. In order to track people’s credits, the co-op issued scrip: a coupon good for one night out. But a funny thing started to happen. People wanted maximal flexibility and so started hoarding their coupons, meaning there were too many people wanting to supply baby-sitting, and not enough who wanted to...
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Mountain Lion →
Users have three choices which type of apps can run on Mountain Lion:
Only those from the App Store
Only those from the App Store or which are signed by a developer ID
Any app, whether signed or unsigned
The default for this setting is, I say, exactly right: the one in the middle, disallowing only unsigned apps. This default setting benefits users by increasing practical security, and also...
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The Age of Big Data →
Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.
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Poor, White, and Republican →
Is it disappearing jobs, or disappearing values? This isn’t an analytical choice I find very useful. Jobs and values are intertwined: when one starts to go, the other is likely to go with it, and the circle becomes truly vicious.
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Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on... →
Mr. Peterson, an easygoing man who looks down when he thinks and smiles sheepishly when he offers an opinion, looked down after completing the story of his own dependence on the safety net.
“It’s hard to beat up on the government when they’ve been so good to you,” he finally said. “I’ve never really thought about it, I guess.”
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Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the... →
If I had to guess, I’d say Lancaster has the last copy of that “souvenier” left on earth. I would also say that it is pretty much the only human trace of what it was like to work at Jamesburg before it was demoted from our national dreams and the site and the people who worked there became subject to the logic of a market that immune to its sublime project. Before the earth...
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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ →
Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
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The Piracy Problem: How Broad? →
“If they don’t make content available where consumers are, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot,” said Ron Conway, a Silicon Valley investor and the head of the SV Angel investment fund.
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Talk Therapy →
“I have a magazine,” she tells Shterna, who responds with a blankly encouraging nod, like if you told your grandma you just started a Tumblr.
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The Living Nightmare →
Being arrested was a relief, he said: “I was struggling between two forces. I wanted to do right but instead I did wrong. That’s it in a nutshell.”
Then Azzad amended the thought. It’s more complicated than that, he said. The counselors in prison made him aware of how the mind creates justifications to tolerate its own misdeeds. “When you do things for a long time that you know to be wrong, you...
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Immigrant dream plays out through son →
[The father] dreamed of coming to the United States for two reasons: to complete his Ph.D. and “to watch the NBA.”
