Thomas Jefferson on Political Disagreements
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”
“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”
I’m currently in the middle of reading Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I’ll be blogging intermittently about this wonderful book over the next few weeks. Expect a few of those posts to be focused on drawing writing lessons from this wonderful author. But a relatively…
I just came across an interesting article in Slate contending that we often perceive handsome men to be jerks because examples of jerky handsome men come more easily to mind than examples of jerky plain men. In the case of single women, the “acceptable” men that they consider entering into relationships with tend to be better…
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 a recent post, I reproduce the figure showing the “stickiness” of odometer readings, when it comes to the price of used cars. Much better to sell your car at 49,999 miles rather than 50,001 miles. But here’s another sticky threshold, that was reported on at 538.com. It shows that when airplane flights leave 40…
In a recent edition of the New Yorker, the magazine published a story by Dashiell Hammett and one of the paragraphs in that wonderful story nicely captures the way that waiting for something bad to happen can be worse than experiencing that bad thing. In the scene, a group of people stand on the sidewalk…
A very disturbing new study was just published, in which physicians viewed a video of a patient with back pain asking for OxyContin. Twenty percent of docs said they would prescribe that med under that circumstance: …Too often, doctors prescribe potentially dangerous medications to patients who shouldn’t be getting them, and what they prescribe is…