June 2012
26 posts
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Spoiled Rotten →
Also key, Druckerman discovered, is just saying non. In contrast to American parents, French parents, when they say it, actually mean it. They “view learning to cope with ‘no’ as a crucial step in a child’s evolution,” Druckerman writes. “It forces them to understand that there are other people in the world, with needs as powerful as their own.”
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“The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all...”
– Amy Howe, of SCOTUSblog
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“[I]t’s unlikely any job advance, material acquisition, or singular event will...”
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Hot Air: Aaron Sorkin's Underwhelming Newsroom →
But in a worrying trend that dates back to Studio 60, Sorkin once again forgot to install the personality chips in his morality bots before letting them off the showroom floor. The denizens of ACN aren’t so much people as they are position papers, earnest talking points in rumpled oxfords.
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On the Origin of Everything →
And I guess it ought to be mentioned, quite apart from the question of whether anything Krauss says turns out to be true or false, that the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just feels all wrong — or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up, where I was growing up, there was a critique of...
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America's Pedestrian Problem
The Crisis in American Walking
How we got off the pedestrian path.
Sidewalk Science
The peculiar habits of the pedestrian, explained.
What’s Your Walk Score?
The company that puts a number on walkability.
Learning To Walk
How America can start walking again.
Offensive Play →
Casson is right. There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.
Most Likely to Succeed →
A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district...
The Perfected Self →
Lacking WiFi and Bluetooth in his office, Skinner had jury-rigged strings and all sorts of wooden and cardboard doodads that enabled him to tweak his environment from his desk chair: by hiding the face of a clock he found himself watching, or by turning on a tape recorder that inspired him to organize his thoughts.
What's in a Name? (Part 1) →
Don’t we love the idea of impostors and interlopers – the idea of someone inventing his own provenance, his own genealogy, something that he has absolutely no control over? Isn’t it satisfying to see the world as malleable and plastic rather than as fixed and immutable? Don’t we all dream about changing exactly those things that cannot be changed?
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Broken News →
The pilot of “The Newsroom” is full of yelling and self-righteousness, but it’s got energy, just like “The West Wing,” Sorkin’s “Sports Night,” and his hit movie “The Social Network.” The second episode is more obviously stuffed with piety and syrup, although there’s one amusing segment, when McAvoy mocks some right-wing idiots. After that, “The Newsroom” gets so bad so quickly that I found my...
Is Political Ideology a Choice, or Is It Hardwired... →
Those on the right were the most easily grossed out, Pizarro found, confirming our intuitive picture of live-and-let-live liberals and law-and-order conservatives. But research also showed that conservatives were not only turned off by flies, turds, and images of people fighting but that they were positively turned on by their own feelings of repugnance, especially in a related experiment...
How Highbrows Killed Culture →
But with the advent of the youth movement of the 1960s, the elite attack took a new and odd turn. The shift in sensibility was first announced by the 31-year-old Susan Sontag in a 1964 Partisan Review essay entitled “Notes on Camp.” The essay, which sent Sontag’s shares soaring on the intellectual stock exchange, dissolved the boundaries between high culture and mass culture in favor of a new...
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The Most Dangerous Gamer →
“If the video game is going to be used for art purposes, then it has to take advantage of its form in some way particular to that medium, right?” he told me. “A film and a novel can both do linear storytelling, but novels are very strong at internal mental machinations—which movies suck at—and movies are great at doing certain visual things. So the question is: Where are games on that same...
The Aquarium →
There’s a psychological mechanism, I’ve come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything...
Mangled Horses, Maimed Jockeys →
“It’s hard to watch these poor animals running for their lives for people who could really care less if they live,” said Dr. Margaret Ohlinger, a track veterinarian at Finger Lakes Casino and Racetrack in upstate New York. She performs pre-race inspections and treats horses injured in races but is not responsible for their overall care.
Last year at the track, Dr. Ohlinger counted 63 dead...
Let’s Be Less Productive →
The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar “commodity.” It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.
