Category Archives: Links

Links: Manhattan, drugs and sex workers, the education myth, campus madness, mega construction, and more!

June 11, 2015 By in Links Tags: 2 Comments

* The myth of the Manhattan construction boom.

* “America’s Newest War: As the war on drugs loses its luster, legislators are intent to make the same mistakes with sex workers.”

* The Education Myth.

* “All About Eve—and Then Some,” hilarious throughout, including: “Even fun, though, can get to be a drag if you have too much of it.” She seems to have understood men, including brainiacs, and to have had a sense of humor: “Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked eighteen-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer. Eve Babitz.”

* Inside the passionate “girl-topia” of BookCon: Where authors are rock stars and geek-chic girls rule.” Maybe.

* “Things I Learned about Credit Bureaus This Week.” This is the sort of thing that would appear in major newspapers, if we had any real journalists left.

* The Campus Crusaders,” and not in a good way; much of the academic study of the humanities has been distorted and disfigured by an overweening obsession with the topics discussed.

* In Tyler Cowen’s words, “Blatant discrimination against Asians, from academia at that, remains an under-reported story.” Highly marketed schools may be less racist than they once were but they’re still racist along different axes.

* “Global aviation is the fastest-growing cause of climate change. And the EPA might let it off the hook.” Facts not much discussed, apparently because the environmentally noisy class is also the travel-and-leisure class.

* Crossrail: Tunneling beneath London. I have a jones for giant projects.

* Why has Apple spawned so few startups?

* “You hear the playback, and it seems so long ago…” Jeff Sypeck on eight years of Quid Plura. Like him I feel this:

When Facebook and Twitter prompted an exodus that made the blogosphere feel as empty as Iceland’s interior, I stuck with it. The culture craves pithier social media—photo memes, five-second movies—but I like long-form writing, even if some days I feel like a ham radio operator or a shut-in dialing into the Internet with a screeching modem and a Commodore 64.

I now have a Twitter feed, which functions mostly as a glorified RSS feed, but I don’t participate much in Twitter or Facebook. They’re too short form to be interesting to me, most of the time.

* 22 years after Verizon fiber promise, millions have only DSL or wireless.

Links: Wasting time, counterintuitive claims, technology won’t fix education, population problems, the modern laptop, and more

June 1, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “Why do people waste so much time at the office?”

* From “The department of unintended consequences:” “It turns out that generous maternity leave and flexible rules on part-time work can make it harder for women to be promoted — or even hired at all.” Basic economics holds that making something more expensive means less of it is consumed.

* Why Technology Will Never Fix Education.”

* “The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education,’” which is news to me and fascinating throughout.

* An obvious point, but, a story about how people can’t be saved from themselves. In this post I wrote, “It is very hard, if not impossible, to fix most broken people.” Penelope Trunk tried, and failed.

* “Ashley Madison: Is infidelity a billion-dollar business?”

* Tugg: A Kickstarter-like method for getting Indie movies in theaters. Brilliant.

* “Germany passes Japan to have world’s lowest birth rate;” the real problem in the developed world is underpopulation, not overpopulation.

* Tech billionaires aim for cheaper spaceflight.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “do musicians get laid alot.”

* The creation of the modern laptop:

Pick up your laptop. Actually, scratch that—read this paragraph first, then pick up your laptop. You are holding one of the most advanced machines ever built in the history of humanity. It is the result of trillions of hours of R&D over tens of thousands of years. It contains so many advanced components that there isn’t a single person on the planet who knows how to make the entire thing from scratch. It is perhaps surprising to think of your laptop as the pinnacle of human endeavour, but that doesn’t make it any less true: we are living in the information age, after all, and our tool for working with that information is the computer.

I use an iMac. Point stands, though, and the iMac’s screen is incredible.

* An interview with Tim Parks.

* On food culture, an interview in which Rachel Laudan points out that industrialized agriculture allows us to live the way we live now, and to romanticize inefficient processes.

“Have We Learned Anything From the Columbia Rape Case?” Not at the New York Times

May 30, 2015 By in Links Tags: , 3 Comments

In “Have We Learned Anything From the Columbia Rape Case?” Emily Bazelon mostly answers “no.” I would very slightly answer “yes,” but in a way contrary to her reading: We’ve mostly learned that colleges are not set up (and should not be set up) to investigate and prosecute serious crimes. We have police and prosecutors for that. Those systems have their problems, but they exist to balance fairness and justice.

University judicial panels are good for relatively minor issues like plagiarism or smoking weed or being a jerk to a roommate. They’re terrible for serious crimes. Bazelon writes, “As universities scramble to improve their disciplinary processes…” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they should be adjudicating serious crimes. Universities should improve their disciplinary processes… by referring cases to police, rather than setting up kangaroo courts.

Oddly, the general issue was covered in a round of articles from last year, which I wrote about here; little seems to have changed since. I wonder too how much time and money universities spend on these issues, rather than on, say, education. Maybe it’s time for universities to see their housing functions as too great an institutional liability and to shed them, since much of the controversy appears to be linked to university-owned housing.

Links: Greenspun on Krakauer, Tesla and hope, shadow workers, Camille Paglia and Sexual Personae, and more!

May 22, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* Philip Greenspun’s non-standard reading of Jon Krakauer’s book Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, which says more about economics than about its putative subject.

* With Tesla Entering Market, Hopes for Home Batteries Grow.

* “Elon Musk’s Space Dream Almost Killed Tesla,” but really the first sentence is the true winner: “In late October 2001, Elon Musk went to Moscow to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile.”

* “Don’t Be So Sure the Economy Will Return to Normal,” from Tyler Cowen, an unusual perspective, as always. See also my 2013 discussion of his book Average is Over.

* “Are You a Shadow Worker?” Social site moderators are, which is one reason they are often so bad.

* No one should condescend to Agatha Christie – she’s a genius.

* Andrew Ng: “Inside The Mind That Built Google Brain: On Life, Creativity, And Failure,” which is brilliant throughout; I note this: “When I talk to researchers, when I talk to people wanting to engage in entrepreneurship, I tell them that if you read research papers consistently, if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two years, after those two years you will have learned a lot. This is a fantastic investment in your own long term development.”

* “GMO Scientists Could Save the World From Hunger, If We Let Them.”

* “Austin, Texas, Is Blowing Away Every Other Big City in Population Growth.”

* “‘Everything in the world is about sex:’ Twenty-five years after its publication, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae is still an energising ‘cultural bible.’” I read it a couple years ago and it’s now among the books I cite most frequently, though its earlier chapters are better than its later ones.

Links: Tesla, women and dating, streets for humans, messy truth, Penelope Trunk, reading, and more!

May 13, 2015 By in Links 2 Comments

* “Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption,” one of these incredibly, shockingly important points that’s easy to miss.

* Why women lose the dating game at 30: Bettina Arndt listens to the other voices in this debate: the men. Maybe.

* Building streets for humans rather than cars could help solve the affordable housing crisis.

* Social Liberalism as Class Warfare—or, points that are too infrequently made.

* “Where Did Penelope Trunk Go Wrong?“, an excellent question though not well explored at the link. I unsubscribed from Trunk’s blog a while ago, though some of her older posts, like “Don’t go to grad school” and “How much money do you need to be happy? Hint: Your sex life matters more” are still excellent. She went from being contrarian and brilliant and willing to say shit other people won’t say to cruel. There is a fine line between speaking the messy truth and being an asshole.

* Why can’t we ready anymore? Long attention spans are one of my competitive advantages in consulting: see also “One of the Open Secrets of Grant Writing and Grant Writers: Reading.” I think attention control is an increasingly valuable job market skill; most of the programmers I know speak of it reverently too.

* Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi review – the global war on terror has found its true witness. We have seen the monsters and many are already inside the castle.

* “For the love of God, rich people, stop giving Ivy League colleges money.” The words “diminishing returns” aren’t used explicitly but are implied throughout.

* Adjunct teaching: “Treadmill to Oblivion.” Short version: Don’t go to grad school. But if you read this blog you should already know that.

Links: Child support and debtors’ prison, broken colleges, the meaning of life, and more

April 21, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.” To call this system “insane” is an understatement. Even calling it a “system” might be overly kind.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed;” if you read nothing else this month read this.

* Jeff offers perspective on the mattress industry and writers more generally.

* “Thinking too highly of higher ed,” by Peter Thiel, who also wrote Zero to One (which you, like everyone, should read).

* “The global secular savings stagnation glut,” the sort of link I rarely post here and yet:

What this discussion should make clear is that secular stagnation isn’t much of a puzzle. Rather, it is a dilemma. The ageing societies of the rich world want rapid income growth and low inflation and a decent return on safe investments and limited redistribution and low levels of immigration. Well you can’t have all of that. And what they have decided is that what they’re prepared to sacrifice is the rapid income growth. In aggregate that decision looks somewhat reasonable if not entirely right. But it is a choice with pretty significant distributional consequences. And the second era of secular stagnation will come to an end when political and demographic shifts allow the losers from this arrangement to say: enough.

* “If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get.”

* “Walter Scott, child support defendant murdered by cop, earned about $800/month.”

* “Nutritional Science Isn’t Very Scientific: The research behind dietary recommendations is a lot less certain than you think.” Just about the only obvious thing is “Don’t eat refined carbohydrates,” like sugar and white rice, and eat vegetables and nuts.

* “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?”

* The Steady Rise of Bike Ridership in New York”

* “Is Capitalism Making Us Stupid?“, a brilliant article with a stupid title.

Jerry Seinfeld intends to die standing up, searching for another breakthrough

April 16, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 2 Comments

Someone sent me “Jerry Seinfeld Intends to Die Standing Up” and I see why. The article is a gem of its kind, but the really good parts are all about process, and so many good people’s processes are similar, and time-intensive: “Developing jokes as glacially as he does, Seinfeld says, allows for breakthroughs he wouldn’t reach otherwise.” That’s also a point of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Perhaps not surprisingly Seinfeld cites the Japanese as an influence:

Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

The writer, Jonah Weiner, also makes the article a pleasure when he writes, “There is a contemporary vogue for turning over an entire act rapidly: tossing out jokes wholesale, starting again from zero to avoid creative stasis. Louis C.K. has made this practice nearly synonymous with black-belt stand-up.” “Black-belt stand-up:” was he consciously referencing himself referencing Seinfeld’s Japanese cricket cages, since black belts are associated with Asian martial arts? I don’t know. I do know based on the article that Seinfeld works for his breakthroughs, as I suppose everyone who does anything significant does.

One senses he’d get along with or hate Jonathan Ive. Love and hate are closer to each other than they are to indifference.

The best writers have a sense of monomania, often disguised as proportion, in them, and written sentences invite the editing and reworking Seinfeld gives to jokes.

This detail is merely true: “A sleek Pinarello racing bicycle, which Seinfeld rides around town, stood against a wall. ‘It’s very addictive, that feeling of gliding through the city,’ he said.” I don’t have a “Pinarello racing bicycle,” and according to Google’s fetching of the bike’s price I probably won’t, ever, but something about biking catches my attention, especially in New York, which may be becoming the world’s best place for riding. I do have a bike that feels right, though, and the addictiveness is real. Five miles in Manhattan feels like more progress than 200 in Arizona. The why still evades me, as the “why?” of humor evades us all while still seeming essential to intelligence.

The gym, otherwise known as The Temple of Iron:

April 9, 2015 By in Books, Links, Nonfiction Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

[I]f we compare the practices of organized religion and the gym, we can identify many similarities: the faithful of both church and gym travel to a separate building, wear special clothes, eat special food and take part in shared rituals that are performed with complete absorption and dedication. For those for whom religion is no longer a marker of identity, and who do not take part in the social aspects of religious observance, going to the gym fulfils many of the same individual and social needs. The major difference is, of course, that churchgoers polish their eternal souls with a view to attaining happiness everlasting, while gym-goers train their bodies for rewards in the here and now.

That’s from The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym, which so far oscillates between thoughtful (as in the quoted paragraph) and exceedingly annoying (“The body, how it is interpreted, represented, used, shaped, and presented in private and public, plays a central role in the transformation of abstract social discourses into lived actions and identities”—which could say, “People interpret other people based on their bodies,” but why use eight words when eighty are available?). Always be wary of writers who use the word “discourse,” because it’s so often a marker of bogosity, and a sign that the writer should read Paglia’s “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf.”

under_armourI go to the gym or run most days, and I have a fascination with articles about the saints of apparel industry—like “Skin in the Game: Under Armour knows athletes. Can it sell to everyone else?” (notice the eroticized accompanying photo, shot by someone who knows his business) or “Chip Wilson, Lululemon Guru, Is Moving On.” One does not have to be a writer for Mad Men to see that these companies are trying, perhaps successfully, to tap into mythic associations and aspirations; both articles could fit into Virginia Postrel’s book The Power of Glamour. Glamour is sometimes its own reward.

The gym, at least the one I go to, is more multiethnic than most of my friend circles or the parties I go to. The net of people caught by the squat cage is wider. There are also interesting gender divisions: men do more free weights and women do more cardio (though they’d probably be better served by free weights). Modesty in the gym is however not a virtue, and in most gyms I’ve seen a lot of eye-fucking goes on, for perhaps obvious reasons. If people once met and mated through religious organizations and now do while pressing, one could add this example to Chaline’s book.

 

 

Apply this also to academics, writers, and artists:

April 4, 2015 By in Academia, ideas, Links Tags: , Leave a comment

Many years ago, my wife and I were on vacation on Vancouver Island, looking for a place to stay. We found an attractive but deserted motel on a little-traveled road in the middle of a forest. The owners were a charming young couple who needed little prompting to tell us their story. They had been schoolteachers in the province of Alberta; they had decided to change their life and used their life savings to buy this motel, which had been built a dozen years earlier. They told us without irony or self-consciousness that they had been able to buy it cheap, ‘because six or seven previous owners had failed to make a go of it.’ They also told us about plans to seek a loan to make the establishment more attractive by building a restaurant next to it. They felt no need to explain why they expected to succeed where six or seven others had failed. A common thread of boldness and optimism links businesspeople, from motel owners to superstar CEOs. (258–9)

That’s from Daniel Kahneman’s highly recommended book Thinking, Fast and Slow. How many times have you read some artists say that they succeeded because they believed totally in themselves and worked demonically to make their careers happen? If you’re like me you’ve heard this narrative many times. But you haven’t mostly heard the narrative about artists who believed totally in themselves and worked demonically only to fail, because they don’t get interviewed and their views don’t hit the media.

The quote is from chapter  24 of Thinking, Fast and Slow, which ought to be required reading for anyone thinking about getting a grad degree in the humanities. People giving advice on this topic tend to have succeeded; those who haven’t succeeded are mute (though less mute than they once were).

Links: Mattresses, kids, keyboards, bikes, perfection, and Broki (and a plea)

April 3, 2015 By in Links Tags: , 2 Comments

* “Slumber Party! Casper leads a new crowd of startups in the $14 billion mattress industry, trying to turn the most utilitarian of purchases into a quirky, shareable adventure. Wake up to the new world of selling the fundane.” Of these companies Tuft & Needle may be my favorite. This is a very sad sentence, though perhaps it isn’t intended as such: “David Perry, an editor at Furniture Today … has covered the mattress industry for 20 years.” Has Perry waited decades for his moment in the startup sun?

* A new study says it doesn’t matter how much time you spend with your kids. Anxious and neurotic upper-middle-class parents, consider yourself relieved. I don’t (particularly) recall wanting to wanting extensively to interact with my parents when I was a kid, though maybe my memory is flawed.

* Rashid Nassar on Unicomp’s amazing customer service.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost“—in financial, equality, and other terms.

* “Why I keep fixing my bike,” which is shockingly beautiful and about more than just the bike.

* “The Temple of Perfection: A History of the Gym, by Eric Chaline.” I ordered a copy:

Eric Chaline, author of this history, suggests that, in the modern world, the gym functions as a “quasi-religious space” where devotees gather together to “wear special clothes, eat special food and take part in shared rituals that are performed with complete absorption and dedication”. For the ancient Greeks, the gymnasium was an important institution (the word derives from gymnazein, ‘to exercise naked’, and they did).

though I am apprehensive: “His analysis of the theme, and of sexuality in general, relies heavily on Michel Foucault.” That is never a sign of a good writer or thinker. I wonder if Chaline has seen Reddit’s Swole Acceptance page, which is amazingly hilarious.

* Book news is weak this week; what am I missing? The new Ishiguro is okay but in my view there are others doing similar things better. I just finished The Possibility of an Island and can’t decide if it warrants an individual post. Emma Sayle’s book Behind the Mask: Enter a World Where Women Make – and Break – the Rules is straight up pornography-memoir (the writing is better than average but still worse than good novels; Never the Face is a good comparison) and I don’t want to write about it in more detail until it’s more easily available in the U.S. What is beautiful but plotful that I need to read? I’m tempted, as often happens, to re-read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.