June 2010
29 posts
My top 5 artists this week. →
Yeah Yeah Yeahs (5)
The Killers (2)
The Kooks (1)
David Byrne & Fatboy Slim (1)
Gary Jules (1)
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Unlikeliest group of the day
From the Rolling Stone McChrystal article, one of these things is not like the other:
The general’s staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There’s a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and...
Just in: Doctors respond to incentives, are human
A new study by Harvard health policy professor Joseph Newhouse finds that when Medicare payments to doctors for chemotherapy are cut, doctors respond by prescribing chemotherapy to more patients than they previously had, thus making up the difference. Predictable or unintended consequence, it’s still Econ 101. Still, policymakers act as if people (and doctors are people) can be immune to...
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California: America's bread basket and food...
Baylen Linnekin has published a new law review article that you should read if you care about your right to eat whatever you want. He points out that California is leading the charge in regulating and banning politically incorrect foods, including hollandaise sauce and Caesar dressing, taco trucks and other street foods, eggs, raw milk, trans fats, and many others. This should worry the rest of us...
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Final thoughts on Disney
I’m back from Disney and here is my verdict: it’s is incredibly ordinary. I’m afraid I have no grand insights to offer, but I’ll take a stab at a few observations.
My last post inspired Jackson Kuhl to riff on how an ideal of cultural authenticity is generally unhelpful, and concluded: “I think perhaps Jerry didn’t want to go to Disney because, as a 30-something dude...
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An extra room in coach hack
I don’t know if the following is common knowledge, but I was proud of myself for thinking it up unassisted, so I’m going to share it with you anyway. Like most happy couples, my wife and I like to sit next to each other on flights, but neither of us cares for the middle seat. I will insist on taking the aisle because I hate having to ask to get up. My wife is accommodating, but because...
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I'm going to Disney World
Starting tonight, I’ll be in Disney World for a week. My father-in-law is turning 60 and he’s taking the whole family (not least his three-year-old grandson) to Florida. I’m very much looking forward to it, especially seeing my wife’s great family.
That said I have to admit that Disney World would not be my first choice of vacation destination. The reason, I tell myself,...
Is the internet making us stupid?
Over at my humble podcast, I interview “Is Google Making Us Stupid” author Nick Carr about his new book, The Shallows, and what the internet is doing to our brains. Nothing good, he argues.
Carr’s publicist deserves a gold medal because the NYT today is running a series of articles on the “trend” that Americans are coming to the conclusion that gadgets and always-on...
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Why do so many artists have lazy eyes?
From Scientific American, another disability turned on its head:
By examining photographs of artists, Livingstone and her fellow researchers found that Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper, Marc Chagall, Jasper Johns, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Rauschenberg, Alexander Calder and others all had misaligned eyes. (And by studying the self-portraits and etchings of Rembrandt, she found he also seems to have...
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Clay Shirky's media diet longview
Clay Shirky describes his media diet to the Atlantic. The whole thing’s a good read (and at the end there are links to media habits of other interesting people), but here’s the part that caught my eye:
In general, there’s no real breaking news that matters to me. I don’t have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use. My phone is on silent ring, nothing...
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It takes two to irony
Aaron has a post on hipsters that cites Dan’s essay on irony, the point of which is that the line between sincerity and irony has disappeared. Dan, probably ironically, said, “I no longer distinguish between that which I do sincerely and that which I do ironically.” This got me to thinking, and I’d like to propose a litmus test for irony.
Irony requires an audience. If...
Why is self-experimentation effective?
Seth Roberts has a new paper trying to explain the “unreasonable effectiveness” of his self-experimentations efforts. To me it’s more evidence of the rise of the amateur.
The puzzle began in graduate school, where I studied experimental psychology. To learn how to do experiments, I tried to do as many as possible. At the time I had acne. It was easy to measure (count pimples...
AT&T announces price cuts for most data customers
Pundits are foaming at the mouth about AT&T’s just-announced end to unlimited data packages for smartphones. Here is Jeff Jarvis calling the move “cynical,” “retrograde,” and “evil.” However, he provides no evidence that this is anything but AT&T facing economic reality. The iPhone was a revolution, and how much data people consume given an awesome...
