November 2009
54 posts
October 2009
48 posts
How marketing has got under our skin →
While recruiting for my company in the early 1990s, I met lots of business-school boys and girls. The first few struck me as completely amazing—their confidence, their projection. The things they said on their CVs about being “natural leaders”, how they were high achievers and team players, their range of smart internships worn like a row of medals, their international experience, impressive...
“the bleakness meter in American life has always been set on high.”
– Mad Men and the Thrill of Other People’s Misery in Sour Times
The Most Important Number on Earth | Mother Jones →
at ExxonMobil’s annual meeting last spring, CEO Rex Tillerson said he envisioned a world that still used fossil fuel for two-thirds of its power in 2030. A world where change came slowly enough that everyone could make every last penny off their sunk investments in coal mines and oil platforms. And a world where politicians didn’t need to raise the price of carbon steeply, and hence...
The new rules of news →
Dan Gillmor of the Guardian
Where I Slept →
In Hawaii’s Health System, Lessons for Lawmakers →
Why is Hawaiian care so efficient? No one really knows.
This is a state where regular milk sells for $8 a gallon, gasoline costs $3.60 a gallon and the median price of a home in 2008 was $624,000 — the second-highest in the nation. Despite this, Hawaii’s health insurance premiums are nearly tied with North Dakota for the lowest in the country, and Medicare costs per beneficiary are the nation’s...
“monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by...”
– Ostrom and Williamson Share Nobel in Economics - NYTimes.com
WatchThe Moments Between, Episode 1: Japan
First woman to win the Nobel Prize for Economics... →
“When local users of a forest have a long-term perspective, they are more likely to monitor each other’s use of the land, developing rules for behavior,” Ms. Ostrom said in an interview. “It is an area that standard market theory does not touch.” Often working with her husband, Vincent, 90, who is a professor emeritus at Indiana, Ms. Ostrom concluded in her research that the “tragedy of the...
“In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back...”
– The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate
WatchThe Walrus: Who Killed Canada’s Education Advantage?
“education is one of those areas that should, and normally does, keep growing...”
– Krugman: The Uneducated American
Aquacalypse Now →
Richard Holbrooke and the war in Afghanistan : The... →
“Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.”
– Richard Holbrooke
“Fish could help save us from the worst consequences of our own folly — yet we...”
– Aquacalypse Now
“Education made America great; neglect of education can reverse the process.”
– Krugman, ‘The Uneducated American’
“MI5 is the first government agency to actually identify a sense of humor as a...”
– Christopher Andrew on MI5
“Today, it is the niche, not the mainstream, media that [provide] blanket...”
– The Pew Center for the People and the Press, quoted by John Ibbitson of The Globe and Mail in How does U.S. democracy survive without its newspapers?
Autism as Academic Paradigm - The Chronicle Review... →
“Digging through the boxes in my garage, cursing the disorganization, I came...”
– Finding a new way to manage my day. - By John Dickerson in Slate Magazine
“We’re trying to make our life into a fairy tale.”
– Kurt Vonnegut explains drama with the help some plot graphs
“We have an innate tendency to impose order upon our experiences and create what...”
– This Is Your Brain on Kafka | Mother Jones
“He saw then how close to breakdown America was, because of hunger. It was...”
– : Norman Borlaug