Opportunists and demagogues both trade in real events and real emotions.
They wouldn’t be called opportunists if they weren’t exploiting a real opportunity. Rick Perlstein via TPM: So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partie...
Category: people
If you were stuck in an elevator, you’d push all the buttons, too.
If you were stuck in an elevator, you’d push all the buttons, too: “The folks who are coming aren’t poor,” said Jonathan L. Walton, a professor of religio...
Little gifts.
In this complicated world we live in where consumer choices are felt to be political choices and vice versa, John Mackay’s op-ed on health care in the Wal...
It’s just a technicality.
Ars Technica: “Domain tasters” take advantage of a five-day domain name grace period to perform risk-free cybersquatting. Since ICANN upped the pena...
The Google, it does not lie.
Results for “whole foods facebook” as of 8am PST this morning: Whoopsies. Update: In 24 hours, the backlash has moved up to second place in Google&#...
Who benefits from government insurance?
It’s been years since I watched Sunday morning talk shows. Maybe as many 20 years. So I’d not had the fortune of hearing wickedly smart demagogues l...
One plate or two? Kolbert on what drives obesity.
Elizabeth Kolbert paraphrasing Brian Wansink: [People] have no idea how much they want to eat, or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instea...
first bleg: employment law and h.r. metrics
Perhaps, a question for a labor lawyer: if a company claims its human resources department is so good that employees don’t need a union, can that claim be...
movies
Movies are uniquely able to transport the viewer into another person’s life – to see the world from an alien point of view. The excellent movie Blame it o...
Recent trends: immigration and income inequality compounding political paralysis
The eight paragraph abstract of Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (MIT 2006) is astounding. Their argument: an increase in immigration...
intelligence
Orangutans use leaves to deepen the sound of their voices in order to scare off predators. Previously: whales.
Beware of minorities with disproportionate political power
In California, minorities have hijacked the government and are hell-bent on driving the economy into the ground. Here’s The Economist: California has been...
why the wii is a necessary progression in virtual interfaces
Ana was just raising the volume on our boombox. She could have held down the button (it’s the chiclet variety) but instead she clicked the button repeated...
are you what you search?
via Andy Baio, a Reddit user claims to have extracted the search history of the murderer in Pennsylvania. If it’s not a hoax, it’s a very selective ...
someone’s memory
we say that we remember our ancestors but in fact we are their memories. we are, each and every one of us, a remembering of another generation. confronting deat...