August 2009
63 posts
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers... →
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect.
Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess →
The Internet’s great promise is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams?
Right is Right ... Except for Lefties →
Handedness shapes our judgments of good and bad, smart and stupid, happy and sad.
A Grand Bargain Over Evolution →
The “war” between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they’re choosing to sit this one out.
My Name is Roger, and I'm an Alcoholic →
In August 1979, I took my last drink. It was about four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, the hot sun streaming through the windows of my little carriage house on Dickens. I put a glass of scotch and soda down on the living room table, went to bed, and pulled the blankets over my head. I couldn’t take it any more.
Why I am Not a Professor →
This year, 2007, marks the marks the eighth year at which I ceased to be a tenured lecturer in the UK, what is called I think, a tenured professor in the USA. I’ve never worked out whether I was, in American terms, an assistant professor or an associate professor. But it really doesn’t matter, because today I am neither. You see I simply walked out and quit the job. And this is my...
Where Hip-Hop Lives →
Five stories up that night, in the building that houses Hot 97, Amy Hackett, the director of institutional relations at Legal Momentum, a women’s-rights nonprofit, was at her desk, working late. She heard the shots, followed by shouting, and decided to wait another hour or so before attempting to leave. Hackett’s taste in radio tends toward NPR. When she finally ventured downstairs, she saw...
Why Smart People Do Stupid Things →
Intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational. Thinking rationally demands mental skills that some of us don’t have and many of us don’t use.
Sex laws: Unjust and ineffective →
America has pioneered the harsh punishment of sex offenders. Does it work?
The Boy Who Heard Too Much →
Like a comic-book villain transformed by a tragic accident, Weigman discovered at an early age that his acute hearing gave him superpowers on the telephone. He could impersonate any voice, memorize phone numbers by the sound of the buttons and decipher the inner workings of a phone system by the frequencies and clicks on a call, which he refers to as “songs.” The knowledge enabled...
We watch them on the bus. At work. At play. We... →
Screens have got us surrounded. Last week I stood on a tube platform watching a Persil commercial being digitally projected in HD on to the opposite wall, to give me something to stare at while waiting for my delayed train. It showed gurgling kiddywinks in polar-white clothes gambolling in a field at the height of summer, tumbling and rolling and skipping and laughing, as if the sheer...
The Grownup’s Guide to Indie Rock →
There’s only one viable avant-garde art form nowadays, and it’s called indie rock. Think about it: Experimental film is waning; painting and sculpture routinely are borrowing from traditions. I’d guess that about 20 people seriously listen to serious music. And poetry is, well, mostly about poetry. But millions of young people like indie rock — they even buy it on vinyl — and I bet if older...
The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the... →
Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.
(Thanks, Benjamin Stein)
This Kilogram Has A Weight-Loss Problem →
More than a century ago, a small metal cylinder was forged in London and sent to a leafy suburb of Paris. The cylinder was about the size of a salt shaker and made of an alloy of platinum and iridium, an advanced material at the time.
Since 1889, the year the Eiffel Tower opened, that cylinder has been the standard against which every other kilogram on the planet has been judged. But...
Learning to Love the Semicolon →
Yesterday, our Editorial Emergency crew Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner offered up a great antidote to semicolon-phobia. “Once you understand their appeal,” they advise, “semicolons can be addictive.” Simon and Julia aren’t the only ones singing the praises of this humble punctuation mark. Lately we’ve seen surprising expressions of affection for the...
Las Vegas: The Casino Town Bets on a Comeback →
I have come for revenge. For years, I’ve hyperventilated at restaurant “tasting menu” checks, forfeited 1,000% markups for bottle service at clubs, neared my credit-card limit for hotel suites, paid usury to strip-club ATMs and pushed far too many chips to the dealer. On this trip, I will get a hotel room for less than the upkeep on the room, eat a meal for near what it costs...
What Do Urban Sounds Do to Your Brain? →
We live in a sonic world, immersed in vibrations that stimulate microscopic hair cells deep inside our ears. This unseen energy influences our mood, our learning, even our health. We experience it as comforting music, as information-laden speech, or—all too often—as irritating noise, a by-product of our increasingly mechanized world. Despite all the ways sound affects us, we often let it slip...
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work →
Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. Mr. Wallace, 46, died last Friday, after apparently committing suicide.
Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle →
Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
Why Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is so great →
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which was released 50 years ago today, is a nearly unique thing in music or any other creative realm: a huge hit—the best-selling jazz album of all time—and the spearhead of an artistic revolution. Everyone, even people who say they don’t like jazz, likes Kind of Blue. It’s cool, romantic, melancholic, and gorgeously melodic. But why do critics...
How To Fly Without ID →
As a die-hard Constitutionalist, I believe that we still have an absolute, unfettered, God-given right to travel from point A to point B without permission from the state — in the air, as well as on land. This Nazi procedure of “your papers, please” has never been appropriate for our country. I have had occasion to travel a good deal in the last several months, and on those...
Secrets of Magus →
One morning last December, a few days before Christmas, [Ricky] Jay came to see me in my office. He wore a dark-gray suit and a black shirt that was open at the collar, and the colors seemed to match his mood. The most uplifting magic, Jay believes, has a spontaneous, improvisational vigor. Nevertheless, because he happened to be in New York we had made a date to get together, and I, invoking a...
Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger →
It is true that most—some might even say all—films about the Holocaust focus on the persecution of Jews. The Holocaust was very bad for Jews; this is an immovable fact of history. But Tarantino isn’t wrong to suggest that the cinematic depiction of anti-Semitic persecution can become wearying over time, particularly for Semites.
A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails →
In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.
On Those "Entitled" Twenty-Somethings →
Apparently people in their 20s are a bunch of entitled whiners. I also hear we’re afraid of hard work. I’m rather sick of hearing it. Of course we have a sense of entitlement—we had an understanding with the older generation. We followed through with our half of the deal. What happened?
Bringing Down the Dogmen →
in the summer of 2007, Stephen Davis and Gary Manning, two officers assigned to the Department of Public Safety’s criminal intelligence division in Houston, had been sitting behind their desks when a lieutenant walked in and said that a player in the Houston-area dogfighting game was ready to talk. The two men sighed. […] “We didn’t want to mess with dogfighting,” recalls Manning, who...
The Wrath of the Killdozer →
Marvin Heemeyer of Granby, Colorado was a profoundly frustrated muffler repair man. In the late 1990s–after years of protests, petitions, and town meetings–it became obvious to the 52-year-old that he was entwined in a gross miscarriage of justice. His business was ruined by some shady zoning changes, and Heemeyer contended that mayor and city council were corrupt. Even as he was forced to give...
What's luck got to do with it? The math of... →
No one can predict the future, but the powers of probability can help. Armed with this knowledge, a high-school mathematics education and £50, I headed off to find out how Thorp, and others like him, have used mathematics to beat the system. Just how much money could probability make me?
Downsizing Firm Specializes in the Art of Letting... →
Hall coaches businesses on how to execute mass downsizings and often visits companies on the designated day to help coordinate a layoff. Then she speaks to the newly unemployed within 30 minutes of their dismissal and offers tips on how to begin a job search. She comforts those who cry and commiserates with those who vent. She does this, sometimes, with 20 despondent people each day. It is a...
While My Guitar Gently Beeps →
The band that upended the cultural landscape of the 1960s is now hitching its legacy to the medium of a new generation: the video game.
My Father The Dope Dealer →
I loved the car trips I took with my mom as a kid. In 1986, we climbed into a rented motor home and bolted south Florida for the mesas of New Mexico, seeing cousins and digging for Indian arrowheads in my aunt’s yard. Later we toured New England, New York, and the Southeast, my mom taking advantage of the long hours behind the wheel to grill me about my grade-school crushes and playground...
Kindle and the future of reading →
I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line...
The truth about grit →
Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success
Congratulations, you flobby slob, now you're a sex... →
Half of humanity received some much-needed assistance from an unexpected source last week. Out of the blue, Lion Bar Ice Cream leapt to the aid of men. Like maggots in a wound, they didn’t know they were helping – they thought they were just garnering some desperately needed publicity in an ice cream-unfriendly summer – but they may have contributed to saving the world’s males huge...
The Curious Case of the Calamitous Cannabis →
Start with grisly slides of gangrenous limbs and feet swollen with fungus-filled nodules. For good measure, add some photos of foot-long guinea worms and eyes running with pus. Then throw in tips from real scientists on how to track disease outbreaks and unravel their mysterious causes. How much more fun could you possibly have at summer camp?
The Savior of Newspaperdom →
Let’s not mince words: Print media is sinking fast. Our ship has hit the profit-margin iceberg and we are quickly drowning in briny deep shit. We can’t shuffle deck chairs any longer. We need definitive answers and we need them now. How can we squeeze profit out of recycled newsprint, Mary Worth comics, and George Will op-eds? Brace yourself for some ideas that are going to knock the barnacles...
Gimme Shelter →
The Cahoots are an evil group of people conspiring against my brother. They created a reality TV show to keep tabs on him, and everything he does is broadcast live, 24 hours a day, on cable. Hidden cameras and microphones are just the beginning of their surveillance. They’ve installed a microchip in his brain. They are responsible for the missing dollars in his bank account, they are the reason...
Telephone Terrorist →
At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed “Dex”, heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year...
For Many Americans, Nowhere to Go but Down →
What if we don’t have cash to buy milk, eggs, bread or diapers? What if our unemployment benefits run out? What if we never find jobs?
How the Food Industry Has Made Bacon a Weapon of... →
The confluence of factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste created processed foods that can hook us like drugs.
Your body wasn’t built to last: a lesson from... →
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now.
A Decade Later, 'The Iron Giant' and Its... →
Combining a relatively infant CGI style with traditional hand-drawn animation, director Brad Bird’s award-winning but critically ignored feature animation debut pondered how a paranoid, post-war America might react to an overwhelmingly powerful interstellar invader. A decade on, the cult classic stands as arguably the most intellectually and emotionally moving science-fiction tale in recent...
Don and Betty's Paradise Lost →
Entering its third season on a fresh wave of Emmy nominations, AMC’s Mad Men is the most stylish—and perhaps best—show on television. Inside its meticulous reconstruction of the precipice that was New York advertising circa 1960, where the men and women of Sterling Cooper smoke, drink, love, and lie, the author learns about the struggle of Mad Men creator (and former Sopranos writer) Matthew...
In The Air →
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures.
How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection →
Spend some time on the Internet, and you’ll start to see a peculiar usage of the word fail popping up everywhere. A conservative blog posts an image of a United States-Russian diplomatic agreement with the president’s name spelled “Barak Obama” and calls it “White House Spellcheck FAIL.” Atlanta Braves fans take out their ire on outfielder Jeff Francoeur (since traded to the New York Mets) by...
How Netflix gets your movies to your mailbox so... →
Out of sight in Carol Stream, 42 people move 60,000 discs daily with quiet efficiency. But don’t drop off your flicks there.
North Korea's Dollar Store →
Office 39, North Korea’s billion-dollar crime syndicate, pays for Kim Jong Il’s missiles and cognac. Why did the Bush White House choose not to shut it down?
One of the Boys →
Leslie Mann flew in from Los Angeles the other day to promote her new film, “Funny People,” on the “Late Show with David Letterman.” In-flight, the actress and her husband, Judd Apatow, the movie’s writer and director, began to fine tune some anecdotes for her. In the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, soon after she landed, Mann explained that Apatow, who used to help write “Letterman” bits for...
The Courthouse Ring →
Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism.
The Last Abortion Doctor →
For thirty-six years, Warren Hern has been one of the few doctors in America to specialize in late abortions. George Tiller was another. And when Dr. Tiller was murdered that Sunday in church, Warren Hern became the only one left.