Culture, Science
In Culture, Science on April 30, 2009 at 1:00 am
There is something of a misanthropist view coming out from the possible outbreak of a swine flu pandemic that highlights mankind’s unhealthy fascination for farmed animal products and a food-production process that is proven to be unsustainable in the long run due to its excessive use of land and agricultural resources as well as the significant pollution caused by the raising, culling and transporting of livestock. Viewed from a different perspective, the pandemic is but a natural manifestation of what is being seen in the global financial markets, where some investors have railed against the excesses of Western countries borrowing well beyond their means to fund a lifestyle that proved unsustainable. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Opinion
In Economics, Opinion on April 29, 2009 at 12:00 am
The end of the 20th century witnessed not just the conclusion of the Cold War, but indeed “the end of history”, a phrase Fukuyama intended to signify not the long-predicted convergence between capitalism and socialism, but rather “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Now, however, the size and nature of the current economic crisis is causing some who have both understood and agreed to wonder whether the “end of history” has been replaced by “the end of growth”, the return of Malthus, or some other such phrase whose real meaning is plain: the replacement of liberalism’s inevitable universalization with its more likely decline or even demise. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Politics
In Politics on April 28, 2009 at 1:00 am
Most political groups in modern history have wanted to build and control a state. Many of today’s nonstate groups do not aspire to have a state. In fact, they are considerably more capable of achieving their objectives and maintaining their social cohesion without a state apparatus. The state is a burden for them, while statelessness is not only very feasible but also a source of enormous power. Modern technologies allow these groups to organize themselves, seek financing, and plan and implement actions against their targets — almost always other states — without ever establishing a state of their own. They seek power without the responsibility of governing. The result is the opposite of what we came to know over the past two or three centuries: Instead of groups seeking statehood through a variety of means, they now pursue a range of objectives while actively avoiding statehood. Statelessness is no longer eschewed as a source of weakness but embraced as an asset. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Economics
In Economics on April 27, 2009 at 1:00 am
Legendary economist Anna Schwartz says the feds have misjudged the financial crisis. She must be the oldest active revolutionary on earth. Born in 1915 in New York, she can still be found nearly every day at her office in the National Bureau of Economic Research on Fifth Avenue, where she has been tirelessly gathering data since 1941. While she has been credited with finding a cure for the Great Depression, Schwartz believes that Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s successor, is “fighting the wrong war today” as “the present crisis has nothing to do with a lack of liquidity.” The credit crunch, which is the recession’s actual cause, comes only from a lack of trust. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Life
In Life on April 26, 2009 at 2:00 am
It’s a terrible thing to come to terms with, but I am the reason the world is in an economic tailspin. Me, alone. All those foreclosures, short sales, bank failures, job losses, bailouts, plummeting stocks, the ripple effect into Europe, China, even Madoff: all my fault. Moi. That last house I sold at 253 Carrington Way? That was the tipping point, I’m convinced. I sold it for $657,500 in August 2005, and now Zillow is damning it at $537,000. I would weep to call the owners now and say, hey, want a market analysis? Sound like fun? I know, you’d rather shove shards of glass under your fingernails, I hear you. All I wanted was a good job I couldn’t lose. I didn’t realize I’d end up bringing down the global economy. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Life
In Life on April 25, 2009 at 12:00 am
So what is making us seek out fear? Is it the whoosh of adrenaline flooding our brains? For men like Martin Ollerenshaw it’s more a reaction to our sedentary society. Previous generations have not needed to look far for danger. We have only to pick up the war poems of Wilfred Owenor Siegfried Sassoon to see that they might have welcomed the mundane and routine. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Ideas
In Being, Ideas on April 24, 2009 at 12:00 am
Science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we’ve gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That’s a pressing question for our century. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Life
In Life on April 23, 2009 at 12:30 am
Pastors preach of a Jesus that wants us to be rich. The famously egocentric wide receiver Terrell Owens declares at a press conference that being labeled selfish is fine with him. Donald Trump names everything he owns after himself and calls his detractors “losers.” We live in a world where everyone can be a star—if only on YouTube. Well, you may need a supersize ego to win “America’s Next Top Model” or to justify your multimillion dollar bonus. But last I checked, most of our lives don’t require all that attitude. Treating the whole world as if it works for you doesn’t suggest you’re special, it means you’re an ass. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Culture
In Culture, Economics on April 22, 2009 at 12:00 am
The fact that Susan Boyle has become an instant celebrity by embodying the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own mediocrity, and crowns stars-for-a-day. A generation of Americans learned the wrong jobs: selling real estate, processing mortgages, and selling cheap imports from China at shopping malls. The cleverest among them got business degrees and learned to trade derivatives. Their services will no longer be required. While the West may look up to their Frat boys who created this financial disaster, China who has been overlooked like wallpaper will continue to export as they have always done, growing their economy and laughing at the West’s foolish mediocre ways. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Science
In Science on April 21, 2009 at 12:00 am
Jill Price is the woman who cannot forget. Doctors and scientists have never found anyone like her. Price doesn’t just remember the past, she feels it –vividly– and bad personal experiences linger. But she can’t really imagine being like the rest of us, either. And, while Price’s memory is extraordinary, to be sure, it is not about just anything. It is about anything having to do with her. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Life
In Culture, Life on April 20, 2009 at 12:00 am
A mother tells her child that Häagen Dazs is a special medicine for mommies because she doesn’t want to share. Another purposely ruins her daughter’s favorite T-shirt with red nail polish. One joins Weight Watchers so she has a place to go by herself once a week. Another mom admits, “I can’t wait to wean my daughter so I can get stoned again.” Are bloggers who proudly identify as “bad moms” challenging ideals of motherhood or reinforcing them? <<<To read article, click here.>>> |
Life
In Life on April 19, 2009 at 12:00 am
Show me what scares you, and I will show you your subconscious leeching out into the world. Every culture – every person – imagines there are terrors waiting for us in the dark: the shape of the monsters changes from year to year, but the fear remains. Man, it seems, needs dread and circuses. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Ideas
In Ideas, Opinion on April 18, 2009 at 12:00 am
The New York Times spun a story of the supposed new reality in the recession-plagued U.S.—Students from more well-off families being given admissions preference at increasingly cash-strapped universities. But the Times article misses the larger point. Lawrence University, Colby College and Brandeis (some of the institutions mentioned) are all fine schools that provide good educations, but they are not entry points into the elite post-graduation professional networks in the same way that top Ivy League schools (and a few others of similar prestige) are. If elite Universities were truly interested in simply recruiting the “best and the brightest” rather than a self-reinforcing community of left-leaning students from affluent families willing to pay confiscatory sums to trumpet Harvard as a status symbol, then a fundamental reform needs to take place. This is how it can happen. <<<To read article, click here.>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Culture
In Culture, Life on April 17, 2009 at 1:00 am
Are $250K-earners middle class? Did rich people think Obama was kidding about raising their taxes? And should we pity those burdened with the indignity of renting their beach house? Meet Donald and Ellen Parnell. They pull in around $250K a year. <<<To read original WSJ article, click here.>>> | <<<To read The Atlantic opinion piece, click here.>>>
Technology
In Politics, Technology on April 16, 2009 at 10:55 am
One outcome of the unrest in Bangkok was proof that leaders in exile can use Internet-based communications devices and video links to stir the masses. The era of ousted leaders using letters and smuggled audio cassettes – and governments silencing their opponents through exile – seems to be over. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Culture
In Culture on April 15, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Once selection by ability was abolished and replaced by comprehensives based on catchment areas, the best state schools would be in the wealthiest parts of town, and the Conservative-voting middle classes need no longer fear competition for scarce places from the bright children of poor homes. And so it has turned out, more or less. But it is much harder to work out why Labour – supposedly the party of the working class –should have tried so hard and for so long to deprive the poor of good schools. If you can understand why this happened, then you can begin to grasp what has gone so wrong with British politics since the Second World War. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Economics
In Economics on April 14, 2009 at 10:55 am
An article in the October 11 New York Times attributed the almost universal failure to anticipate our current economic crisis to “insanity” — more precisely, to a psychological inability to give proper weight to past events, so that if there is prosperity today we assume that it will last forever, even though we know that in the past booms have always been followed by busts. But experts on the business cycle, such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, are not confined to basing predictions on naïve extrapolation. So why did he and other experts, inside and outside of government, neglect warning signs of a coming crash? <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Politics
In Politics on April 13, 2009 at 2:46 pm
It’s universally recognized that some people benefit hugely from recessions. But no one really expects those beneficiaries to be philosophers. John Gray, thus far, has had a fabulous recession, not least because he was one of the few people who forcefully predicted it. As he says, all he had to do is figure out the tipping point of our current state of Prozac politics. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Economics
In Economics on April 12, 2009 at 2:23 pm
What, if anything, have we learned from this decade’s man-made economic disaster? It wasn’t just trillions of dollars of wealth that went poof in the bubble. Certain American values also crumbled and vanished. Making quick killings by reckless gambling in the markets — rather than by investing long-term in new products, innovations, technologies or services that might grow and benefit America and the world — became the holy grail in the upper echelons of finance. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Being
In Being on April 11, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Religulous, Bill Maher’s religion-baiting documentary, confirms what modern atheists hate most about religion: its humancentricity. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
In Uncategorized on April 10, 2009 at 11:22 am
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Being
In Being on April 10, 2009 at 10:51 am
For all the advances and wonders of our global era, Christians, Jews, and Muslims seem ever more locked in mortal combat. But history suggests a happier outcome for the Peoples of the Book. As technological evolution has brought communities, nations, and faiths into closer contact, it is the prophets of tolerance and love that have prospered, along with the religions they represent. Is globalization, in fact, God’s will? <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Culture
In Culture on April 9, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Not long ago, New Yorker film critic David Denby had an epiphany: American culture was being debased by “snark,” that “low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing” style of criticism, a “bad kind of invective” that’s “spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation” and proliferating on the Internet. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Life
In Life on April 8, 2009 at 11:10 am
A specter is haunting Russia today. It is not the specter of Communism—that ghost has been chained in the attic of the past—but rather of depopulation—a relentless, unremitting, and perhaps unstoppable depopulation. The mass deaths associated with the Communist era may be history, but another sort of mass death may have only just begun, as Russians practice what amounts to a vodka ethnic self-cleansing. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Life
In Life on April 7, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“The thing you have to understand about Dubai is – nothing is what it seems,” Karen says at last. “Nothing. This isn’t a city, it’s a con-job. They lure you in telling you it’s one thing – a modern kind of place – but beneath the surface it’s a medieval dictatorship.” <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Economics
In Economics on April 7, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Instead, the present global financial crisis has made the godfather of classical economics look strikingly irrelevant in comparison with Keynes, the inventor of modern disequilibrium theory. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Culture
In Culture on April 7, 2009 at 6:04 pm
There are not many moments in history when it is possible to worry that the world has become too happy for its own good. <<<more>>>
