“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters
In the New Yorker this July, Jon Lee Anderson wrote a fascinating article about Timbuktu, where Al Qaeda is working to become a legitimate political power. A scary story. But a beautifully written one. Take this paragraph when he introduces readers to the city in question: Timbuktu is a small, unlovely city in shades of…
In his youth, Jefferson didn’t lack for confidence except, it seems, when smitten by an attractive girl. One night at a dance, he worked up a bunch of things he could say to a girl named Rebecca who he was hoping to become acquainted with: “I was prepared to say a great deal: I had…
“When an illness is viewed as inexplicable and impenetrable, people tend to react to it with one of two extremes: either they stigmatize it or they romanticize it. It’s hard to know which is worse.” – Michael Foster Green, Professor, UCLA Department of Psychiatry (Click here to view comments)
“An extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.” Alex Stone recounts this joke in his book, Fooling Houdini, which I wrote about in a previous post. As a philosophy major, I love to think there might be a college major more full of nerds and introverts…
“If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.” -Clay Shirky (Click here to view comments)
When New Jersey decided to hike its minimum wage by some 20 percent in 1991, David Card and Alan Krueger recognized a tremendous opportunity to test how the minimum wage affects employment.
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