June 2010
56 posts
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Opium Made Easy →
Last season was a strange one in my garden, notable not only for the unseasonably cool and wet weather—the talk of gardeners all over New England—but also for its climate of paranoia. One flower was the cause: a tall, breathtaking poppy, with silky scarlet petals and a black heart, the growing of which, I discovered rather too late, is a felony under state and federal law.
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Plagiarism Inc. →
Jordan Kavoosi built an empire of fake term papers. Now the writers want their cut.
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Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure →
Brin, of course, is no ordinary 36-year-old. As half of the duo that founded Google, he’s worth about $15 billion. That bounty provides additional leverage: Since learning that he carries a LRRK2 mutation, Brin has contributed some $50 million to Parkinson’s research, enough, he figures, to “really move the needle.”
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The Sting of Poverty →
What bees and dented cars can teach about what it means to be poor - and the flaws of economics.
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Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind →
At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect.
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Not A Lone Wolf →
Scott Roeder is now serving a life term for murdering abortion doctor George Tiller. But did he really act alone?
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In search of the perfect round rolling object →
The soccer ball brought to Kashmir in 1890 is a far cry from the hi-tech one of today – so’s the game.
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Tuna’s End →
What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in the world. It’s also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe and whose two populations, or “stocks,” have both been catastrophically overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic...
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Are we really in a cultural golden age? →
Sallust, the Roman historian who made his name by connecting great events to the moral outlook of the people involved in them, said it more than 2,000 years ago: “The golden age is before us, not behind us.” Twenty centuries later, we still don’t seem to have learned his epigrammatic lesson: We—both the critical we and the popular we—spend an inordinate amount of time looking backward and...
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The Terminator Comes to Wall Street →
How computer modeling worsened the financial crisis and what we ought to do about it.
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Secret of AA: After 75 Years, We Don’t Know How It... →
AA and its steps have become ubiquitous despite the fact that no one is quite sure how—or, for that matter, how well—they work. The organization is notoriously difficult to study, thanks to its insistence on anonymity and its fluid membership. And AA’s method, which requires “surrender” to a vaguely defined “higher power,” involves the kind of spiritual revelations that neuroscientists have...
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The “Thriller” Diaries →
Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” remains the most popular music video of all time: a 14-minute horror spoof that changed the business. Behind the scenes it gave its star a temporary home with director John Landis, sparked a near romance with actress Ola Ray, and revealed how damaged the young pop idol already was
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Pissing Match: Is the World Ready for the... →
Krug is an unusual entrepreneur. Twenty years ago, he was a rising star in the film and television business. He served as a vice president of the Disney Channel in the 1980s and ran a distribution company with members of the Disney family in the ’90s. But 11 years ago, Krug became convinced that the world did not need another TV show. What it needed was a better urinal.
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Regulators Failed to Address Risks in Oil Rig... →
Its very name — the blind shear ram — suggested its blunt purpose. When all else failed, if the crew of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig lost control of a well, if a dreaded blowout came, the blind shear ram’s two tough blades were poised to slice through the drill pipe, seal the well and save the day. Everything else could go wrong, just so long as “the pinchers” went right. All it took was one...
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The Quiet Coup →
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.
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The Best Vacation Ever →
How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.
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The Hunt for the God Particle →
We have all heard of ‘dark matter’. But what about dark galaxies, dark planets - even dark people?
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The Anosognosic’s Dilemma →
It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. But just how prevalent is this effect?
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The Case for Having More Kids →
Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think.
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The Pony Rides Again (and Again) →
Although it ran only briefly 150 years ago, the Pony Express still defines our understanding of the Old West.
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All the Dead Are Vampires →
A natural-historical look at our love-hate relationship with dead people.
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In Praise of Tough Criticism →
When it comes to criticism, is compassion really preferable to combativeness? Does an upbeat style actually encourage positive tendencies in the profession? Is compassion an intellectual virtue? The answer to those questions is no.
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The Velluvial Matrix →
Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine last week. Here is what he told the graduating class.
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What Is I.B.M.'s Watson? →
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer.
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Boom →
Lost in the catastrophic aftermath of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is the gripping tale of the rig workers and the Coast Guard crewmen who rescued them.
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Ideas Having Sex →
How prosperity and innovation exceeded the expectations of John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith.
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Washington's I.T. Guy →
One man’s quest to liberate all government information — with or without the government’s help.
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No Kids Allowed →
Inside Scientology: A Times Special Report
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Big Pimping →
Why is it so hard to catch men who sell teen girls for sex?
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The Perils of Positive Thinking →
Why self help almost never equals self improvement.
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The Animal-Cruelty Syndrome →
The beleaguered pit bull is merely the most publicized victim of a phenomenon that a growing number of professionals — including police officers, prosecutors, psychologists, social workers, animal-control officers, veterinarians and dogcatchers — are now addressing with a newfound vigor: wanton cruelty toward animals. Before 1990, only six states had felony provisions in their animal-cruelty...
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How Did Sport Get So Big? →
Once, it was only a game. Now sport is a never-ending drama, a soap opera watched all over the world. Tim de Lisle works out how it happened.
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Out of Sync →
Puberty is difficult enough. Imagine going through it when you’re nine.
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Why has Britain become so rude? →
It shapes our humour, politics and even fine art – rudeness comes easily to the British.
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No Refills →
In 2009, only 25 new drugs were approved—less than half the number in the mid-’90s. Why are new pharmaceuticals so hard to bring to market? Overcautious regulators and profit-hungry conglomerates make easy scapegoats, but they’re only partly to blame.
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The Rumpled Anarchy of Bill Murray →
Bill Murray is considered by his colleagues to be a man who has made peace with any private demons he might have had, someone who has brought his personal life and his career into enviable concord. Slightly disheveled and projecting what Richard Donner, the director of ”Scrooged,” calls ”a woolly Zen wisdom,” Murray acts as a kind of father figure to the ”Saturday...
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Playing for the World →
Why football—please don’t call it soccer—is the most important sport in history: a lingua franca for 204 countries, an expression of national identity, and a powerful link between multi-millionaire athletes and the man on the street.
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Alone, With Words →
Why writers can’t live to please their readers.
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Target Anxiety: the Penalty Shootout Reconsidered →
The penalty shootout is the monster under soccer’s bed. There are good reasons for this. Well, there are reasons, anyway, and they grow knotted and blighted from the nature of the penalty kick itself.
(Thanks, Eush)
Correction
After the launch of the recent Give Me Something to Read redesign, we failed to notice that the submission form wasn’t working. This has now been amended. We regret the error.
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The End of Men →
For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?
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A Classical Education: Back to the Future →
Sounds downright antediluvian, outmoded, narrow and elitist, and maybe it was, but when I returned home I found three new books waiting for me, each of which made a case for something like the education I received at Classical.
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The Golden Boy and the Invisible Army →
When the H1N1 swine flu virus boiled up out of Mexico last year, the CDC became the epicenter of a worldwide struggle to stop its deadly march. Twenty miles north, at a brick house in Johns Creek, the virus found a perfect host.
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Football is War →
The notion that international sporting competitions inevitably inspire warm fraternity – an idea advanced by Baron de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic games – is a romantic fiction. The violence of British football hooligans, for example, reflects a peculiar nostalgia for war. Life in peaceful times can be dull, and British glory seems a long way in the past.
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Attached to Technology and Paying a Price →
Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
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The Economic Case for Promiscuity →
You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.
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Airport security: Intent to deceive? →
Can the science of deception detection help to catch terrorists?
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Justice →
A father’s account of the trial of his daughter’s killer.
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How To Spot A Spook →
Both the Soviet and American intelligence establishments seem to share the obsession that the other side is always trying to bug them. Since the other side is, in fact, usually trying, our technicians and their technicians are constantly sweeping military installations and embassies to make sure no enemy, real or imagined, has succeeded.
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The Future Of America's Working Class →
Watford, England, sits at the end of a spur on the London tube’s Metropolitan line, a somewhat dreary city of some 80,000 rising amid the pleasant green Hertfordshire countryside. Although not utterly destitute like parts of south or east London, its shabby High Street reflects a now-diminished British dream of class mobility.