December 2011
5 posts
2 tags
“If wolverines have a strategy, it’s this: Go hard, and high, and steep,...”
– Douglas H. Chadwick, author of The Wolverine Way, quoted in the Globe and Mail.
2 tags
3 tags
England Without Rooney
Via the WSJ:
Since Rooney made his international debut in 2003, he’s missed a total of 29 England games through injury or suspension. In those games, England has a winning percentage of .689—versus .603 when he’s in the lineup. England has even scored more goals without him (2.21) than with (1.90).
1 tag
3 tags
WatchWSJ panel on the origins of innovation featuring Matt Ridley, Jonah Lehrer, Steven Berlin Johnson, and Peter Sims.
November 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“Perhaps the ‘something nicer’ which should replace capitalism is a...”
– John Kay
2 tags
Watch
October 2011
10 posts
2 tags
4 tags
2 tags
“What did I ever do to you?”
– Gaddhafi to a rebel fighter, as quoted in the Daily Mail, Oct. 20, 2011.
1 tag
2 tags
“A mischievous person might even ask whether ‘supply-side economics’...”
– Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, Oct 3, 2011
4 tags
3 tags
3 tags
2 tags
2 tags
September 2011
19 posts
2 tags
1 tag
“Hey! Guess what? My daughter didn’t even ask what the HPV shot was for.”
– there’s no way a vaccine will encourage kids to have sex (via kellyoxford)
2 tags
“People appear to dislike politics and politicians so much that prompting them to...”
– Angus Deaton, economist at Princeton, cited in the Washington Post. (h/t: Eric Barker)
1 tag
1 tag
Sunday Links & Letters
Welcome to Sunday.
Here are a few of the most interesting things I read this week:
1. New research is challenging an old economic dogma: Equality and inefficiency are not trade-offs.
2. Could Einstein’s special theory of relativity be wrong?
3. “The 18-year-old’s body had been decapitated, the arms cut off and the skin removed.” Such was the horrible fate of Zainab...
1 tag
“‘Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them...”
– Roger Ebert, Life Itself, 2011. An excerpt.
2 tags
Watch
2 tags
“China is a poor country with only $4,000 per capita income. To talk and think...”
– Yu Yongding, economist and former member of the Chinese central bank’s monetary policy committee.
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
Sunday Links & Letters
Welcome to Sunday.
Here are a few supplementary links to my Twitter feed, supplied by friends and family:
1. “Francois feels that a man can only take so much before his dignity demands he rise up against an absurd and unjust universe.” That’s from Youth in Revolt, which my friend Clint recommends. Here’s a clip.
2. The “Big Society” is tasting a little bland....
2 tags
Lofgren's Farewell Jeremiad
Mike Lofgren, a veteran staff member for Republican lawmakers in the House, has called it quits after 16 years, excoriating the GOP with a farewell jeremiad. I’m not sure I’d call it “principled,” as some enthusiastic opponents of the GOP have, so much as self-preserving. Lofgren’s departure speaks to the triumph of the New Republicans, who, like the Gadarene swine,...
2 tags
“I always like to say people take me too seriously and not seriously enough all...”
– Lady Gaga
1 tag
3 tags
Sunday Links & Letters (Self-Help Edition)
Welcome to Sunday.
I took a bit of a vacation this week from my usual reading load. In lieu of the heavy-duty reads, here are a few links to change your life and change your mind:
1. Can you change your luck? Eric Barker and James Altucher offer some suggestions. Here is a fascinating blog post on what “lucky” people do differently.
2. Can you change your behavior? Here’s what...
1 tag
1 tag
“They can put listening devices where they like. They can tap my telephone calls....”
– Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi
2 tags
“I was honored to be compared to Darth Vader.”
– Dick Cheney
August 2011
21 posts
1 tag
“He was an ironic rationalist who, like all rationalists, had an irrational...”
– Adam Phillips on Byron, “Stag at Bay,” London Review of Books, August 25, 2011 via Tyler Cowen
3 tags
1 tag
WatchA historical sketch of the Soviet Union, to a Tetris tune, by Chris Lincé via @brainpicker
2 tags
Sunday Links & Letters
Welcome to a wet Sunday (if you live on the east coast), a literal reminder of the metaphoric truth that “the rain it raineth every day.”
Among the most interesting things I read this week are three portraits of political figures on the right:
1. Lucky: That’s a word a lot of people associate with Rick Perry. The Daily Telegraph provides an excellent portrait, including an...
3 tags
1 tag
“The conservatives had announced several times that they wanted to get rid of...”
– Mikhail Gorbachev in an interview with Der Spiegel, published August 18, 2011. (Interview by Matthias Schepp and Christian Neef in Moscow; translated from the German by Christopher Sultan).
1 tag
Sunday Links & Letters
Welcome to Sunday.
Here are a few things that inspired me this week:
1. I recently re-read Chapter 42 of Moby Dick in which Ishmael confesses that what terrified him the most about the whale was its sheer whiteness. Echoing Burke, the chapter is a meditation on the sublimity of the color white. Ishmael mentions Lima, a city near and dear to my heart:
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of...
1 tag
“…Hitherto, this nationwide civil unrest has been largely the work of...”
– Siôn Simon, “A Violent Convulsion of Kids on Holiday From High School,” Newsweek, April 15, 2011.
1 tag
“… the seeming immorality of rioting without a cause …”
– “UK riots: Paul Lewis’s five-day journey,” The Guardian, August 12, 2011
2 tags
1 tag
Sunday Links & Letters
Welcome to Sunday.
Here are some of the most interesting things I read this week:
1. The Browser has a round-up of articles about the English riots. My suspicion is that you’ll learn more about the writer from a lot of these pieces than you will about the root causes of the riots themselves. Two short interviews with rioters can be found here and here (although you should not...
2 tags
1 tag
“Sometimes, civic-republican pragmatism can be a fancy label for a fundamental...”
– William Galston, political theorist and former Clinton advisor
1 tag
“There were three things to do in Paint Creek: school, church, and Boy Scouts....”
– Rick Perry on growing up in Texas in the late 1950s.