January 2011
Yesterday’s Modern Love column was one of the best. A great example of how a short story can convey some of the key dynamics of dating / romance better than lengthy exposition. Hard to excerpt, so read the whole thing, but here’s the ending: In the months that followed, I was determined to become a better version of myself — prettier, smarter, more ambitious — and looked for the...
by Patrick Appel
Kristof is in Cairo. He reads the mood:
The people I talked to mostly insisted that the army would never open fire on civilians. I hope they’re right. To me, the scene here is eerily like that of Tiananmen Square in the first week or so after martial law was declared on May 20, 1989, when soldiers and citizens cooperated closely. But then the Chinese government issued...
That’s one of the most important decisions you’ll make today. How much time and effort should be spent on intake, on inbound messages, on absorbing data… and how much time and effort should be invested in output, in creating something new. There used to be a significant limit on available intake. Once you read all the books in the college library on your topic, it was time to...
by Chris Bodenner
Issandr El Amrani catches up with a charismatic character:
The man on the front page of today’s al-Masri al-Youm is a national hero. He’s an army officer who decided to join the protestors (he hadn’t been part of those deployed in Cairo). I spoke to him about what he and the Egyptian people wanted — here’s the video. Again, please translate it in the...
by Zoe Pollock
Fred R. Shapiro corrects the record on famous quotes often misattributed to men:
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an...
Yes, you shouldn’t text while driving, or talk on the cell phone, or argue with your dog or drive blindfolded. It’s an idiot move, one that often leads to death (yours or someone else’s). I don’t think you should text while working, either. Or use social networking software of any kind for that matter. And you probably shouldn’t eat crunchy chips, either. I...
by Patrick Appel
Max Fisher live-blogs the news:
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking this morning on network news shows, called for a peaceful transition to democracy in Egypt. Clinton said the U.S. opposes Egypt becoming a “military dictatorship” but noted that the military has so far shown restraint. Clinton denied earlier reports that the U.S. was...
Will Wilkinson on Obama’s state of the union address and the follies of telling Americans that this is our “Sputnik moment”: I’m lucky to have been in the last cohort of American children to grow up with the living fear of total nuclear annihilation. That “the world’s fastest computer” now chugs away in China hardly leaves fourth-graders contemplating...
by Patrick Appel
Reihan emphasizes that America’s government and America are not the same thing:
In the contemporary United States, the entire population does not feel as though the national security apparatus speaks for them. This was always true, of course. But now the dissenting minority can actually exercise “soft power” of its own, through the deployment of philanthropic...
by Patrick Appel
Scott Lucas at EA is live-blogging again:
As the night drags on and the military keeps telling people to go home - and in one case to defend their own property -, the mood in Cairo seems to be one of defiance. Nobody seems to want to leave the city center and give Mubarak and his government the chance to come to grips with situation.
The immediate task of the government...
The guy who revolutionized baseball stats had a simple insight: past performance is a good indicator of future performance. The stock market doesn’t follow that rule, but an awful lot of human performance traits do. The question one must ask before ignoring the past performance rule (if you’re doing a job interview, say) is, “what am I replacing the Bill James rule with?”...
By the time I arrived, out of breath, at the Delta check-in desk at Detroit airport a couple days ago, I felt like I had overcome so many obstacles to get there that success was surely just one more easy step away. If only. Here’s what happened, and it contains a lesson for dealing with customer service agents in challenging circumstances. I left my hotel room at the Courtyard by Mariott...
by Chris Bodenner
Scott Lucas updates:
Downtown Cairo is the scene of chaos right now with several buildings on fire - reports say.
1845 GMT: In Cairo, the ruling NDP’s headquarters has been almost totally destroyed by the fire. Fire fighters are now trying to put out the flames after protesters destroyed the building. Reports suggest some protesters looted the building before it was...
He bootstrapped himself. A scrawny little kid at 15, he decided to change who he was and how he was perceived, and then he did. The deciding was as important as the doing. He went to the edges. He didn’t merely open a small gym, a more pleasant version of a boxing gym, for instance. Instead, he created the entire idea of a health club, including the juice bar. He did this 70 years ago. He...
by Patrick Appel
Full text of the speech here. The NYT compares the words used in SOTU speeches since Roosevelt. Nyhan calls the SOTU the “most overcovered event in politics relative to the amount of the news that’s made.” His take on the spin:
Instant polls of people who watch the speech are meaningless (it’s a non-random sample skewed toward the president’s...
by Patrick Appel
Frum, who saw through Palin from the start, counters Douthat:
[L]et me try to explain why the Palin phenomenon cannot be left behind quite so fast.
In 2008, the Republican party nominated for the office of vice-president a person who is now pretty universally agreed to be unfit for the presidency. (Even Taranto agrees with that.) Concededly: it’s not the first time in the...
Skeptoid by Brian Dunning is my favorite podcast. I download episodes onto my iPod and listen to them while driving (earbud in one ear). I recently enjoyed his take on Myers-Briggs Personality Test. I’ve seen personality tests used to detrimental effect in the workplace. For example, employees getting pigeonholed by their bosses based on the results of their test. So I was already...
Today on the Dish, Conor raged against the cable news machine and wasn’t too broken up over Olbermann’s anouncement. Patrick parsed the cult of Palin and Douthat’s dismissal of her, while Andrew took a sick day. Conor raised concerns about Obamacare, took Rich Lowry to task, and rallied for a political blogosphere with lots of parties and cliques. We rounded up reactions to the...
by Zoe Pollock
Michelle Goldberg profiles the complicated mindset of Philip Weiss, the Jewish anti-Zionist blogger and founder of Mondoweiss:
[Weiss] looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled. Because he came to Middle Eastern issues late in life, he has no fond memories of labor Zionism, or maddening recollections of the times Palestinians spurned opportunities for peace, to complicate his...
A friend sent me a copy of a new book about basketball coach Don Meyer. Don was one of the most successful college basketball coaches of all time, apparently. It’s quite a sad book—sad because of his tragic accident, but also sad because it’s a vivid story about a misguided management technque. Meyer’s belief was that he could become an external compass and taskmaster to his...
It’s a lot easier for an organization to adopt new words than it is to actually change anything. Real change is uncomfortable. If it’s not feeling that way, you’ve probably just adopted new words.
Ferrah Merali shines a light on Palestinian rap:
Rap in Israel-Palestine is its own animal, tied up in all the complexities of the region’s larger conflict—including, for example, discrimination against Palestinians from Arab countries. The Middle East’s Arab nations have historically been loath to allow Palestinians to settle on their soil, in an effort to force Israel to recognize the...
They all say the same thing, according to David McCandless:
The bulk of the words in horoscopes (at least 90%) are the same. That’s not a full, proper statistical analysis. (If you are a statistician and you want to do a proper analysis, please get in touch) The cool thing is, once you’ve isolated the most common words, you can actually write a generic, meta prediction that would apply to all...
This is difficult if you also insist on treating every customer the same. Or treating every customer the best, which is a better way to describe a similar idea. No, the only way you can treat different customers differently is if you understand that their values (and their value to you) vary. It’s easier than ever to discern and test these values, and you do everyone a service when you...
The perception of risk is skewed when bad outcomes are vivid, personal and immediate. Given the choice between working on the important and the urgent, the urgent almost always wins. Given the choice between avoiding the rare but grisly outcome or doing the hard work to avoid the equally nasty, more subtle but more common outcome, we usually go for the grisly. We do this sort of miscalculation...
I recently read long-ish profiles of James Franco and Matt Taibbi. After reading each one, I thought, “They are both leading very full lives.” In a good way. From The James Franco Project in New York magazine: According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman...
Larison says his piece:
Obviously, the killer was deranged, but the same could probably be said about Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist assassin of William McKinley. That doesn’t make their destructive goals any less political. Nihilism is a charge that a lot of people have thrown around in the last few years, and it has usually been wrong. There are so few actual nihilists that it is usually a...
Today on the Dish, Andrew unravelled the right’s evasions on the assassination. The market for Palin tanked, Andrew wouldn’t let her dismiss the shooting as non-political, and Frum didn’t think Palin demonstrated any larger humanity with her response. Beck calmed Palin down by presaging an assasination attempt on her, and Conor didn’t want to blame her for thinking...
Jonathan Alter predicts that the president will comment on the Gifford tragedy during the SOTU address:
The State of the Union will almost certainly begin with heart-wrenching symbolism. Ever since Ronald Reagan put a “citizen hero,” Lenny Skutnik, in the balcony of the House chamber after he rescued passengers from the wreck of an Air Florida jet that crashed in the freezing Potomac River in...
Allison Miller, aged 14, sends and receives 27,000 text messages a month. Hey, that’s only about sixty an hour, every hour she’s awake. Some say that the problem of our age is that continuous partial attention, this never ending non-stop distraction, addles the brain and prevents us from being productive. Not quite. The danger is not distraction, the danger is the ability to hide....
If one were to try and muster the most pious response to the attempted Giffords assassination - and actual assassination of a federal judge - it would be hard to beat this:
I hate to say this, but the blame game is already under way.
It began within hours of Saturday’s horrifying shooting of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and nearly 20 others, even before the gunman was...
A reader writes:
I’ve struggled a great deal to make sense of some of my psychedelic experiences, being all too aware of how they can be reduced to mere “chemicals acting on the brain.” That’s certainly not what they felt like, but I can’t convey that sense of profundity to someone who hasn’t had those experiences.
I credit my conversion to Christianity to...
A cop with a Surefire flashlight doesn’t have to say to her partner, “I’m sorry my flashlight isn’t so bright.” It’s made without compromise for people who won’t compromise. There are high margins in the business of high-end flatware, for people who don’t want to apologize for the lack of an asparagus fork when they have fancy company over. One of...
The full live-blogged post is here. More tomorrow as we recover more facts.
For now: a prayer for all those still miraculously struggling for life, for those who are helping them, for those who have been murdered, and for all the families and loved ones affected by this crime. A prayer too for the dark and twisted soul who committed this act, because it is also a Christian duty to see the human...
6.23 pm. I retitled this post once it emerged that Giffords might survive. But others have been killed, including a child and a federal judge, John Roll. And there’s a context there as well:
In February, when U.S. District Judge John Roll presided over a $32 million civil-rights lawsuit filed by illegal immigrants against an Arizona rancher, the Marshals Service was anticipating the...
Wait, I was confused. There’s a sure-fire recipe for delicious chocolate chip cookies. There is in fact a magic formula. For businesses, not so much. There isn’t one secret, one process, one solution. Instead, there are a thousand or maybe a million. It’s not a jigsaw puzzle, it’s a strand of DNA, easily rearranged and sometimes it even works. For a while.
Daniel Engber reports on a disturbing trend among nerds:
The archetypical sword murderer, for his part, is a 20- to 40-year-old white male who still lives with his parents. He’s often a paranoid schizophrenic, and he often expresses himself by killing his mother or father.
Today on the Dish, Andrew feared a rising tide of religious fundamentalism. The Daley dish from the left kept rolling in, and Andrew defended Obama’s choice. Andrew skewered the “swinging dicks” of the conservative media elite, and felt a smidge less of his Palin concerns since she fell prey to her own love of over-exposure. Hal Rodgers planned to replace Obamacare with funding...
China is building 100 new airports by 2020. By the time that’s all done, 1.5 billion Chinese will live within 90 minutes of an airport. That’s from this review of the forthcoming book Aerotroplis: The Way We’ll Live Next, which looks interesting. The book’s premise is that future cities will be built around airports as opposed to the other way around: What rules in today’s...
For more than a decade now, religious fundamentalism has been the driving force behind global events. If you see it as the underlying cause of 9/11, then our response to that event has not, alas, seemed to help. Yes, we have constructed a national security state that, at enormous financial and constitutional cost, has kept the worst from happening for longer than anyone was predicting in, say,...
1. Throwing is more important than catching. If you’re good at throwing, the catching takes care of itself. Emergency response is overrated compared to emergency avoidance. 2. Juggling is about dropping. The entire magic of witnessing a juggler has to do with the risk of something being dropped. If there is no risk of dropping, juggling is actually sort of boring. Perfection is overrated,...
Today on the Dish, Andrew exposed Paul Ryan for a fraud, the GOP’s healthcare repeal law would increase the deficit by $230 billion, and Douthat called the GOP on their spending illusions. An Irish Catholic sportswriter came out, and readers challenged Andrew on his claim that Catholics approve. We got some historical perspective on calling a horserace this early, and the GOP was reliving...
More readers respond to this controversial post:
“Unadultered crap” indeed. This cute video went viral last spring. The family is on a road trip and the little Korean toddler starts wailing because his African-American dad tells him he can’t be a “single lady” while his white and South-Asian sisters are singing to Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”....
Anil Dash notes the double edged sword of Twitter’s transience: Perhaps the most important psychological innovation of Twitter is that it assumes you won’t see every message that comes along. There’s no count of unread items, and very little social cost to telling a friend that you missed their tweet. That convenience and social accommodation is incredibly valuable and an...
Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Israel’s chokehold on Gaza via a Wikileaks cable. We featured more fallout from CPAC’s acceptance of gays, which some blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood. The recession changed us (the graph edition), and Andrew and Allahpundit weren’t buying the Republicans on fiscal reform, or on healthcare reform either for that matter. Mitch Daniels feared for...
A different take:
There seems little doubt to me that psilocybin is a very remarkable substance. Whether its effect on the brain merely simulates profound spirituality or whether it actually recreates it chemically is a philosophical conundrum we won’t solve very soon. But that we recognize it somehow as transcendent, that it can be measured in brain scans as indistinguishable from...
While it might be more fun to rant about broken online forms and systems, we can learn a lot from sites that aren’t broken as well. Consider the Ibex store. Here are five things they do that make them successful online:
They sell a product you can’t buy at the local store. This is easily overlooked and critically important. Because it’s unique, it’s worth seeking out...
Today on the Dish, Andrew joined Paul Gottfried’s pile-on of Lowry, and commended E.D. Kain on his interview with the editor of The American Conservative. Bruce Bartlett and Andrew banded together to ask Obama to save sane conservatism, Matt Steinglass nailed Israel’s growing illiberalism, while Andrew saw the larger fight against religious fundamentalism.
Andrew didn’t care...
Oslo, Norway, 3.36 pm
…might actually make them cost less. What would happen if your organization hired a meeting fairie? The fairie’s job would be to ensure that meetings were short, efficient and effective. He would focus on: Getting precisely the right people invited, but no others. Making the meeting start right on time. Scheduling meetings so that they don’t end when Outlook says they should,...