Ronald Coase to join writers of Mad Men for next season.
The United States benefits from a market economy. Only, it’s not really a market economy, is it? Economist Nancy Folbre in the New York Times: [A] large s...
Category: ideas
epistemology, philosophy, theology, religion
Teen romance, FTW!
Kathrine Gutierrez improves on what looks to be a dreadfully boring movie about Darwin by imagining it as a teen romance: it should’ve been about him bein...
The power of words, again.
Raffi Khatchadourian in the New Yorker: At the time of Steele’s deployment, the 101st Airborne’s base of operations in Iraq was in Tikrit, and its o...
A prime-time soap opera about subprime loans.
The great American prime-time soap opera is overdue for a comeback. I’d tune in for a reboot of Dynasty or Dallas featuring characters loosely based on th...
Be afraid, be very afraid.
on the brouhaha over the President of the United States addressing America’s public school children. one of the few benefits of being a Cuban refugee is t...
Mamma mia.
I’m fascinated by Italy because the gap between what it claims to be (liberal democracy, capitalist economy, Catholic society) and what it actually is (kl...
I hear that train a-comin’, it’s rollin’ ’round the bend.
On mike and maaike’s concept vehicle, the atnmbl. As energy becomes more expensive, roads more congested and computers both more powerful and cheaper, the...
America’s got no class; i.e., it’s a class-bound society.
About a week ago, someone on MetaFilter posted a link to Wal-Mart People, the photo blog that mocks people who, wittingly or not, draw too much attention to the...
House paint manufacturers of the world unite.
Following up on the carrot vs. the stick, Matthew Yglesias writes: “Manufacturers of white paint need to hire some better lobbysist or something” si...
Using CG to render the possible: a greener world.
On Before New York in National Geographic. To date, computer graphics have been used most memorably in live-action movies to realize futuristic objects like spa...
The stick isn’t quick enough – use the carrot, instead.
We’re built pretty well: put your hand over an open flame and you’ll jerk it away in a few milliseconds. For this to happen, the nerves in your hand...
It’s the scripts, stupid.
There’s a presentation making the rounds lately that pokes fun at companies hoping to “capture the magic” of the Apple iPhone by making device...
Wal-Mart as an innovative, modern business.
My summary of a recent interview with historian Nelson Lichtenstein on Wal-Mart: 1) Wal-Mart’s first innovation was data mining, which it did using bar co...
Do you know what this cryptic phrase means?
I’ve been watching Google Trends Hot Trends for fun recently. Most of it is self-explanatory. A story breaks or a show hits the air and people respond wit...
Always on the offense, never on the defense.
The tell is more important than the telling: Voters don’t have a great deal of knowledge about the issues, or a great deal of interest in acquiring knowledge ab...
It’s just a technicality.
Ars Technica: “Domain tasters” take advantage of a five-day domain name grace period to perform risk-free cybersquatting. Since ICANN upped the pena...
Fingernails on a blackboard, muffled and distant.
I hear the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, muffled and distant when I hear someone say “utilize” when they could so much more easily say ̶...
Who benefits from government insurance?
It’s been years since I watched Sunday morning talk shows. Maybe as many 20 years. So I’d not had the fortune of hearing wickedly smart demagogues l...
first bleg: employment law and h.r. metrics
Perhaps, a question for a labor lawyer: if a company claims its human resources department is so good that employees don’t need a union, can that claim be...