Sabermetric Research: Explaining “How much time is wasted struggling through murky explanations in pedantic textbooks, or incoherent notes from class, when you might have been able to understand it in five minutes if it had been done a bit better?”
Not Merely the Finest TV Documentary Series Ever Made “His argument (one of the delights of The Ascent of Man is that it consists entirely of argument) begins by directing our attention away from the common heritage of animals and toward one particular difference between humans and all other present-day species: Every other species is […]
War – organized war – is not a human instinct. It is a highly planned and cooperative form of theft. And that form of theft began 10,000 years ago, when the harvesters of wheat accumulated a surplus and the nomads rose out of the desert to rob them of what they themselves could not provide. […]
20 minutes at Rucker Park: A streetballer’s cross-country journey from the Deepest Part of Hell to take his shot on New York’s most storied basketball court
Newt Gingrich To Conservatives: ‘What Would You Have Done?’ – Ta-Nehisi Coates – The Atlantic “When Gingrich compliments Mandela on his presidency he doesn’t do so within the context of alleged African pathologies, but within the context of countries throughout the world. It’s a textbook lesson in “How not to be racist,” which is to […]
Apartheid’s Useful Idiots “But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa’s white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage.”
if it were easy to get out of, nobody’d be in it | Fredrik deBoer “It was vintage Scocca: right on the facts and on the substance, analytically adroit, not quite as good as he clearly thought it was, and perfectly designed to flatter the sensibilities of the average reader of Gawker. “
Childbirth device invented by car mechanic looking at wine bottles This is almost a stereotypical way inventions happen. An expert in one field sees an innovation in a second field and applies it to solve a problem in a third field.
Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s Liberator as Prisoner and President, Dies at 95
The Honest Broker: Is Growth Getting Harder? If so, Why, and What Can We Do About It? ‘Is this the normal outbreak of “secular stagnation talk” that always comes to the fore during and after every deep cyclical depression? Or are things, this time, really different? What is the argument that we are beginning an […]
The science of self-control: 6 ways to improve your willpower “the willpower response is a reaction to an internal conflict”
On Smarm “Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It’s not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of […]
We will, in about 40 years time…be able to produce anything we need for virtually nothing. That will destroy the present social, economic and political system… We have spent the last 150,000 years dealing with the problem of scarcity. Every institution, every value system, every aspect of our life has been dictated by the need […]
A Short Checklist for Avoiding Mediocrity in the Gamefication of Loyalty “Miles programs are oft-touted as the canonically well-constructed and successful loyalty game; my experience “winning” the game has taught me otherwise.”
People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole! Theodore Levitt kenarneson.tumblr.com