Which online habit makes you happier?
It would be interesting to test whether users of the popular online tools (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Orkut) have devised uses (habits, activities) that makes ...
Category: people
Do Americans listen as much as they talk? We might be able to answer that.
In “Go West,” Peter Hessler returns to America after years of living in China and finds that we Americans like to talk about ourselves and are good ...
Marshall: “the Republican party has chosen to hoist its sail to religious bigotry”
Josh Marshall: No doubt the president’s advisers would much have preferred not to address [the Islamic community center] at all, wish it had never come up...
Who runs Trader Joe’s?
Fascinating profile of two German brothers, billionaires, and their global discount retail empire which includes Trader Joe’s.
Countering a movement of feelings, not ideas.
Or, why a sustained, national commitment to mental health will do wonders for our constitution. As prompted by this post on Metafilter. Richard Hofstader writin...
First, they came for the art I did not care for, and I said so many things…
I was surprised to find yet another conversation about the Rodarte makeup line for MAC on MetaFilter this morning, some two weeks after the controversy began. T...
Yes, your mind is playing tricks on you. It’s how it works.
People who are in the business of selling things have always tried to make the leap from observation, “People who like X also like Y”, to prediction...
Investments in a well run society.
In a well run society, there should be no difference between doing work that benefits yourself in the future and doing work that benefits others immediately.
Countering the real threat of fake news.
Short version: To counter the real threat of fake stories – e.g., “Right-Wingers Stand By Their Fabricated Mexican Drug Cartel Raid Story” – it̵...
Can online reviews reveal anything new about popular restaurants?
I recently came across a restaurant on Yelp.com, Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco, with nearly two thousand reviews. I guess the average number of re...
Tracing urban migrations from Census and city records.
Can the price of homes tell you anything about who will gravitate to a neighborhood; will they be young or old? With or without children? Double or single incom...
When all you have is a Twitter stream, everyone starts to look like a twit.
Dave Pell: When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to co...
The “got it” rule for passing and AI chess.
My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let ...
Bald men of the world unite, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Hairstyles don’t just frame faces, they frame facial gestures. I wonder if having a shaved head – as I often do – doesn’t have a subtle but lasting ...
The last mile: the human answer.
In retail, the last mile, the human touch, is the most important. Especially when you’re trying to launch a new kind of product, one that requires consume...
Should Haiti exist?
Nation-states are important, even necessary fictions. But they are fictions. (For example, the U.S.A. is nearly a century older than Italy.) David Rothkopf asks...
How little we know about our bodies, our understanding of self.
I’d bet my house that if more Americans knew and accepted this fact, we’d have more rational identity politics: “We have over 10 times more microbes...
Why there are no more geese in Prospect Park, NYC.
Unintended Consequence #824,357 of humans “filtering” nature (aka, how evolution happens), from KingEdRa, a commenter at MetaFilter: First thereR...
Movie: The Damned United
My second favorite soccer movie of the last two years. If Rudo y Cursi is an “A+”, The Damned United is a solid “A”. Michael Sheen’...
Runaways and refugees.
Teens crossing the border for survival. To China. North Korea, perhaps because of its proximity, physically and culturally, to more successful nations, has got ...