October 2009
57 posts
Monsters and the Moral Imagination →
Monsters are on the rise. People can’t seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we have the release of the usual horror films like Saw VI and Halloween II; the campy mayhem of Zombieland; more-pensive forays like 9 (produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov), The Wolfman, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon; and, more playfully, Where...
P vs. NP →
Frequently called the most important outstanding question in theoretical computer science, the equivalency of P and NP is one of the seven problems that the Clay Mathematics Institute will give you a million dollars for proving — or disproving. Roughly speaking, P is a set of relatively easy problems, and NP is a set of what seem to be very, very hard problems, so P = NP would imply that the...
How GeoCities Invented the Internet →
A garish collection of home pages paved the way for blogging, social networks, and the rest of Web 2.0
Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption →
Recently Senator Charles Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has been looking into financial ties between the pharmaceutical industry and the academic physicians who largely determine the market value of prescription drugs. He hasn’t had to look very hard.
The man who invented exercise →
In the early years after the second world war, health researchers in Britain noticed a curious epidemic: people had begun dying of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. Nobody knew why, and so a scientist in London named Jerry Morris set up a vast study to examine the heart-attack rates in people of different occupations – schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers and more.
The Sin of Yielding to Impure Desire →
A brief history of sex ed in America.
The White House’s war with Fox News →
By effectively cornering the market on anti-Administration animus, Fox News has had a robust 2009 so far, and the recent decision by the White House to declare war on the channel is not likely to put a dent in the ratings. That decision has dispirited some of the President’s well-wishers. It has also puzzled them. In American politics, it should be considered a good thing when, after you have...
Does Economics Violate the Laws of Physics? →
The financial crisis and subsequent global recession have led to much soul-searching among economists, the vast majority of whom never saw it coming. But were their assumptions and models wrong only because of minor errors or because today’s dominant economic thinking violates the laws of physics?
The Future of Abstinence →
It’s been a mainstay of sex ed for more than a decade. Now, as the Obama administration cuts off federal funding, the movement scrambles for money, determined to continue its mission.
Living on $500,000 a Year →
What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10...
The Return of Hobbes →
In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give “Jack” more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. “Jack” is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It’s true. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary...
Medical Robots and technological therapy →
Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Matarić wrote software that helped robots to independently navigate...
Mixed Feelings →
For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected...
The Kindest Cut →
In Colorado, a surgeon helps restore feeling—and so much more—to victims of female genital mutilation.
Quitting the Paint Factory →
I distrust the perpetually busy; always have. The frenetic ones spinning in tight little circles like poisoned rats. The slower ones, grinding away their fourscore and ten in righteousness and pain. They are the soul-eaters.
Confessions of an Opium-Seeker →
Driven by romantic, spiritual, and medicinal imperatives, the author goes in search of something everyone tells him no longer exists: an opium den. From Hong Kong to Bangkok to the Golden Triangle, he is offered every decadence known to the East—and learns the truth about a legendarily perfect drug.
How I Survived China →
Through my wife’s and my first year in Shanghai, I felt worse by the day. Tired, achy, surly, weak. And that’s not even counting the hospital stay with IV-drip antibiotics, after I naively drank bottled water in a Buddhist-run vegetarian restaurant—and on the way out saw a waiter filling the “Evian” bottles from a hose. Friends we’d known in our pre-China life did pitying double takes when they...
Does anyone like 3-D? →
Has it really come to this? I read in Variety, the film industry journal, that ‘Mark Thomas of Elsinore Films is producing a 3-D musical Hamlet targeting the Harry Potter and High School Musical market’. I am not concerned for Hamlet, which has been kneaded into so many preposterous shapes and survived. What horrifies me is the prospect of seeing the film in 3-D. Variety helpfully explains:...
Jay-Z, Freddie Gibbs, and the end of hip-hop →
Hip-hop has relinquished the controls and splintered into a variety of forms. The top spot is not a particularly safe perch, and every vital genre eventually finds shelter lower down, with an organic audience, or moves horizontally into combination with other, sturdier forms. Disco, it turns out, is always a good default move.
Wired for Hypocrisy →
It’s not only the rich and famous who have made hypocrisy a fine art, though when advocates for the poor such as John Edwards build gargantuan homes, or family-values preachers such as Ted Haggard fess up to “sexual immorality”, they sure make it seem so. But garden-variety hypocrisy is so rife—the “environmentalist” who bought a Hummer because, come to think of...
The Risk Pool →
What’s behind Ireland’s economic miracle—and G.M.’s financial crisis?
(Thanks, lumivore.)
Wall Street's Naked Swindle →
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits
How the Crash Will Reshape America →
The crash of 2008 continues to reverberate loudly nationwide—destroying jobs, bankrupting businesses, and displacing homeowners. But already, it has damaged some places much more severely than others. On the other side of the crisis, America’s economic landscape will look very different than it does today. What fate will the coming years hold for New York, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas? Will...
Just what is it about adding blades that makes a... →
Just what is it about adding blades that makes a razor better? Thomas Jones speaks to the scientists and technicians behind the latest five-bladed device and asks what next for the serious business of shaving
The Pity of War →
Is leading one’s own troops to slaughter ever justified?
Against Transparency →
The perils of openness in government.
Mad About Mad Men
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What’s wrong—and what’s gloriously right—with AMC’s hit show
Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the... →
On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski.
We've Seen the Future, and It's Unmanned →
Every so often in history, something profound happens that changes warfare forever. Next year, for the first time ever, the Pentagon will buy more unmanned aircraft than manned, line-item proof that we are in a new age of fighting machines, in which war will be ever more abstract, ever more distant, and ruthlessly efficient.
Does the Vaccine Matter? →
Whether this season’s swine flu turns out to be deadly or mild, most experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before we’re hit by a truly devastating flu pandemic—one that might kill more people worldwide than have died of the plague and AIDS combined. In the U.S., the main lines of defense are pharmaceutical—vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread of flu and prevent people from...
The Lost Prestige of Nuclear Physics
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The story of nuclear physics is one of the most remarkable marketing disasters in intellectual history. In the space of a few decades, the public perception of the atom’s promise to serve humanity, and the international admiration that surrounded the many brilliant people who unraveled the mysteries of matter, had collapsed. So pronounced was the erosion of attitudes toward nuclear physics...
The Snatchback →
If your ex-spouse has run off and taken your children abroad, and the international legal system is failing to bring them back, what are you to do? One option is to call Gus Zamora, a former Army ranger who will, for a hefty fee, get your children back. Operating in a moral gray area beyond the reach of any clear-cut legal jurisdiction, Zamora claims to have returned 54 children to left-behind...
The forgotten story of ... Danish Dynamite →
They won nothing, but the ultra-attacking team of Elkjaer, Laudrup and the Olsens were one of the most interesting in football history
What Poker Can Teach Us →
As a writer, professor, and community organizer, Obama was greeted coolly by some of his fellow legislators when he arrived in Springfield in 1998 to take a seat in the Illinois Senate. How was this ink-stained, poshly educated greenhorn supposed to get along with Chicago ward heelers and conservative downstate farmers? By playing poker with them, of course.
The Uneducated American →
If you had to explain America’s economic success with one word, that word would be “education.” In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education. Then, as other nations followed suit, the “high school revolution” of the early 20th century took us to a whole new level. And in the years after World War II, America established a commanding position in higher education.
Football, dog fighting, and brain damage →
How different are dogfighting and football?
A Library to Last Forever →
Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books...
The Lost Generation →
The continuing job crisis is hitting young people especially hard—damaging both their future and the economy
Modernism and the little magazines →
The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal
None of the Above →
If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations?
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect →
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies...
Behind the Autism Statistics →
The CDC now says that 1 in 100 Americans has autism. But is the epidemic real? It turns out that many children with other developmental problems are being given autism diagnoses just to get them state funding.
Understanding the Anxious Mind →
The tenuousness of modern life can make anyone feel overwrought. And in societal moments like the one we are in — thousands losing jobs and homes, our futures threatened by everything from diminishing retirement funds to global warming — it often feels as if ours is the Age of Anxiety. But some people, no matter how robust their stock portfolios or how healthy their children, are always...
The history of management consulting →
Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?
The Next Brainiacs →
This is the story of the most fearless entrepreneur ever: the human brain.
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger →
Robic’s insanity exists only in digitally recorded form, but the rest of the time it swirls moodily around him, his personal batch of ice fog. Citizens of Slovenia, a tiny, sports-happy country that was part of the former Yugoslavia until 1991, might glow with beatific pride at the success of their ski jumpers and handballers, but they tend to become a touch unsettled when discussing Robic, who...
Alien →
One of the great strengths of “Alien” is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings). It suggests the enormity of the crew’s discovery by building up to it with small steps: The interception of a signal (is it a warning or an SOS?). The descent to...
Ablative, Allative, Adessive, Obsessive →
Sometimes we turn to ritual to find peace in the solemnity of routine, in the comfort of regular practice. But occasionally we turn to ritual for another reason: because our favorite activities are just too embarrassing to do in public. My obsession, reading textbooks on foreign languages and memorizing obscure grammatical detail, is ritual of the latter persuasion. Not to put too fine a point...
In Pursuit of the Wild Cohiba →
But really what we wanted was a smoke—an exquisite bath in the fog from the world’s iconic cigar without having to break the law, break the bank, or break up with lovers bleating cancer, cancer or braying about stinking up the house. Why was it turning out to be so hard?
Numbers Guy →
According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.