looking at the dark side
George Soros: Recognizing a problem is an invitation to do something about it. That is the main lesson I learned from the formative experience of my life, in 19...
Category: people
competition
An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world. HFT requires competitors to use cu...
The eyes of the other
John Lahr profiles actor Al Pacino: To Pacino, there is no such thing as a fourth wall. “The audience is another character in the play,” he said. “They become p...
The campaigns
I was reading about the person who inspired the poem Ozymandias when I came upon the headline: “First Syrian Campaign.” Huh, I thought, so he also w...
Who let the bots out
Today I had occasion to contact roughly two dozen friends via the message or chat tool on Facebook. When first contacted, two of them replied by asking if I was...
a rage for rigor
TO THE HYPHENATED POETS Richer than mother’s milk is half-and-half Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal je...
actor and spectator
in the actor-spectator relationship, both participants experience self-knowledge by “trading places” with another person. for the actor, self-knowle...
why do marketers anthropomorphize cookies and candies?
perhaps, eating is inherently social – that is, we are hardwired to eat with others. how then to justify “indulging” oneself with food? perhaps, by ...
Bingo in Baghdad
From Daniel Voll’s The Hunter Becomes the Hunted in Esquire: Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and und...
Sons and daughters
The poignant, universal story of inter generational drift (class, immigration) obliquely rendered by Benjamin Dewey:
The religious impulse
Elif Batuman in the New Yorker: The findings at Göbleki Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a scared site that f...
The eyebrows of Björk circa 1988
The most beautiful eyebrows I have seen in some time – perhaps, because I do not live in Iceland.
From Plato’s Republic to The Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov
Wherein I argue that the best way to learn, apart from painful personal experience, is via a story filled with colorful characters. Exhibit A: The Firearms Phil...
How North Koreans (and Cubans) read the state-sponsored newspaper
From the excellent blog Ask a Korean!, a very familiar account of how readers adjust to propaganda in order to eke out the truth: Take, for example, the war in ...
Less black and white, still good versus evil.
Patricia A. Turner: To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because i...
The only true mirror is the funhouse one.
In the last 24 hours I’ve had the pleasure to experience two novel and fun works of art: The Exterior World, a sarcastic animation by David OReilly and St...
Overheard at ORD: what about us Americans?
A few minutes ago, I was sitting near two men in their 50s at an airport in Chicago. They were talking current events, headlines. The economy, the dollar. One w...