On Improving Communication

“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters

“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.”
—John Durham Peters
Andrew Solomon wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker recently about Adam Lanza’s father and his search for answers to his son’s awful behavior. The piece included a quote I thought I would share with you today: All parenting involves choosing between the day (why have another argument at dinner?) and the years (the…
Would you rather work in a stimulating, challenging job or a routine one filled with mundane repetition? Almost everyone would say they prefer the former. But a new study finds that people typically contradict themselves once salaries enter the decision. If the two jobs pay the same, people often opt to put out less effort, not more….
In another great New Yorker article, Lauren Collins writes about controversy over taxing wealthy people in France, a controversy that has already caused Gerard Depardieu to move to Belgium and/or Russia. At one point in the article, she interviews experts to get their views on whether such taxes are effective in raising revenue. One expert…
Early in his book The Power Makers, Maury Klein does a fantastic job of explaining the importance that modern energy systems, like steam and electricity, played in human history: All the achievements of humanity down to about the eighteenth century were constrained by the inability to find more efficient ways to do things beyond the…
I have long been a fan of single sentence paragraphs. I really have. When used properly, an occasional one-off sentence can really stand out, amidst the tumble of longer paragraphs made up of complicated sentences. Here’s a good example from The Power Broker. In this part of the book, Robert Moses has spent an intense…
Until recently, the state of North Carolina, where I live, was a bastion of political moderation, especially compared to our neighbors in the southeast. Our politics were moderate in part because the Democratic Party remained relatively strong in the state, and to survive in this region of the country had embraced center left, rather than…