But whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing–out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world. We use metaphors to make sense to one another. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What is going on in small-town America? The nation’s mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man’s set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war’s skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a veritable academic industry devoted to chronicling urban decline, small towns’ struggles are off the grid. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
David Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker whose interests include global ecology, has examined numerous communities across America and discovered one that strikes him as a model of environmental efficiency. That community is New York City, and in Green Metropolis , his latest book, Owen tells readers what green-conscious citizens can learn from Gotham’s example. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The first time Jay Keasling remembers hearing the word “artemisinin,” about a decade ago, he had no idea what it meant. “Not a clue,” Keasling, a professor of biochemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, recalled. Although artemisinin has become the world’s most important malaria medicine, Keasling wasn’t an expert on infectious diseases. But he happened to be in the process of creating a new discipline, synthetic biology, which—by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science, and molecular biology—seeks to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world. <<<To read full article, click here.>>
We have learned since September that the present generation of economists has not figured out how the economy works. The vast majority of them were blindsided by the housing bubble and the ensuing banking crisis; and misjudged the gravity of the economic downturn that resulted; and were perplexed by the inability of orthodox monetary policy administered by the Federal Reserve to prevent such a steep downturn; and could not agree on what, if anything, the government should do to halt it and put the economy on the road to recovery. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Back in 1959, a gourmet American dinner might have included tomato aspic (gelatin with canned tomato juice), crab casserole (canned crab with canned cream-of-mushroom soup and canned fried onions), and cherries jubilee (canned cherries heated in a chafing dish with brandy and sugar, “flambéed,” and poured over vanilla ice cream). Ethnic food came in two varieties: Americanized Italian (spaghetti with meatballs and red sauce, with grated “Parmesan” cheese from a green cylindrical box) and Americanized Chinese (fried rice and shrimp with lobster sauce). For the everyman, there was steak (well done) and mashed potatoes and canned peas, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and canned peas, and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned peas. Or the newfangled but repulsive TV dinner. Food has changed. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As Americans confront what has been dubbed the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, they may be forgiven for failing to linger over soon-to-be-old current events, because they recognize that for the first time in their lives they’re in the grip of history. They’re anxious, even terrified, about what that may mean for their daily lives and dreams and—really the same question—for their children’s lives and dreams. Because this pervasive trepidation is unprecedented in their lifetime, most Americans have reflexively invoked the Depression in their efforts to comprehend their experience. But, how can you live in the Depression when you are driving a nice car and still going on vacation? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture. “Eventually, we’ll figure out a way of spreading that knowledge to the world in general, and that has nothing to do with selling shoes online,” he told me after I visited the company over the summer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
To anyone who, like me, has lived in a Muslim nation, none of this behavior is either singular or surprising. It is the way men in most Islamic nations prefer things to be. We can talk forever about the nature of culture versus faith: how ancient rites and practices like the circumcision of girls (85 percent of all Egyptian girls have endured this procedure), or the tradition of keeping women ignorant and housebound, can corrupt a religion that never intended for these things to happen. But it is no coincidence that women who must submit to Sharia law find themselves in a very bad place, wherever those women and those places happen to be. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation — clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs’s legacy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We must stop perpetuating the fiction that existence itself is dictated by the immutable laws of economics. These so-called laws are, in actuality, the economic mechanisms of 13th Century monarchs. Some of us analyzing digital culture and its impact on business must reveal economics as the artificial construction it really is. Although it may be subjected to the scientific method and mathematical scrutiny, it is not a natural science; it is game theory, with a set of underlying assumptions that have little to do with anything resembling genetics, neurology, evolution, or natural systems. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Investigation of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome has been an important cause of new research into memory. And our understanding of memory is, in turn, propelling a debate about what is known as enhancement, or the boosting of human capacities beyond a normal level. First there was mood enhancement with drugs like Prozac. Then came aids to concentration like Ritalin or newer “neuroenhancing” drugs like Adderall. Now we see possibilities to modify our moral character, using neurological techniques to make us ethically better. And the latest holds out the promise of drugs to help forget traumatic memories, or even to stay devoted to our sexual partners. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Frans de Waal’s book title, “The Age of Empathy”, has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasised the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbour. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What is snark? Abuse in a public forum of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing. How does snark work? Snark is hazing on the page. It prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying. It pretends to be all in fun, and anyone who’s annoyed by it will be greeted with the retort, “How can you take this seriously? What’s wrong with you?” – which has the doubly aggressive effect of putting the victim on the defensive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with different cultural seasonings added for flavor. When parents restrict behaviors that children regard as personal choices, such as what clothes to wear or which friends to hang out with, disputes inevitably arise. Parental restrictions on behavior that kids view as morally wrong or as a violation of conventional social rules are often accepted, even if grudgingly. Charles Helwig explains how universal concerns, not cultural values, may shape kids’ developing notions of right and wrong. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
On Sept. 2, 1859, at the telegraph office at No. 31 State Street in Boston at 9:30 a.m., the operators’ lines were overflowing with current, so they unplugged the batteries connected to their machines, and kept working using just the electricity coursing through the air. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To read NASA article about storm, click here.>>>
Perhaps I may begin with a few words about the title. There is too much nuance and variety to make such sharp distinctions as theirs-and-ours, them-and-us. And neither I nor anyone can presume to speak for “us.” But I will pretend it is possible. There is also a problem with the term “crisis.” Which one? There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation. But again I will pretend otherwise, for simplicity. Noam Chomsky explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google’s book search is clearly on track to becoming the world’s largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In a windowless room in a shabby office building at Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street, in Manhattan, a poster is taped to a wall, whose message could easily be the mission statement for a day-care center: “Children are fragile. Handle with care.” It’s a June morning, and there are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today. This hurried communication system which once was seen as an advantage for our youth however is showing to be definite disadvantage. The absence of gesture, eye contact, and personal posture makes for problems. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In Stand Up and Cheer!, a bizarre 1934 Hollywood movie remembered today mostly for the sensational performance of the five-year-old Shirley Temple, President Roosevelt appoints a Broadway impresario to his cabinet as Secretary of Amusement. His mission is to distract the public and get them to laugh, which presumably would bring the Great Depression to an end. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Silly Season ceases to be “silly” when what passes for political debate in America turns not merely stupid or witless, but certifiably demented. I write of the kooky reaction of many conservatives–politicians, citizens and commentators in the media–to the plan by President Obama to address the nation’s children. (And I write, please note, as a nonlefty libertarian who did not support Barack Obama in the presidential election.) <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Aviation has long been blamed for its share of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, some travellers now ask themselves whether their flight is strictly necessary and, if they decide it is, salve their consciences by paying for the planting of trees. These, so they hope, will absorb the equivalent of their sinful emissions. But you, dear reader, are indulging right now in activity that is equally as polluting as air travel: using a computer. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Internet’s great promise is to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Potential Readers should not be deterred by the vaguely Hallmarkish cover—and subtitle—of this book, both of which may be blamed on the publisher. Looking for insight, Elizabeth Edwards is more likely to quote Ovid than the Gospels. From the Old Testament, she prefers the Book of Job, and no wonder. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity. How is it that Tocqueville became right? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kim Kardashian has practically made a living off her curvaceous figure. But the E! network celeb was looking a little less shapely in Complex magazine in April, her body reduced about a dress size, her legs smoothed to near-perfection. How did readers know? Complex accidentally posted a pre-Photoshopped image of Kardashian on its website — before her thighs, arms and waist had been digitally sculpted. In a matter of hours the photo was gone. But in that brief time span, those who spotted it got a little reminder that we should think twice about taking photographs at face value. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can’t. Philosophers and gurus, holy books and self-help manuals have all warned of the futility of equating material gain with true well-being. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Once upon a time, the Central Intelligence Agency was a near-omnipotent, immaculately stealthy organization of serious-minded men who stood watch over the West. Nowadays, of course, the CIA is usually portrayed in a different light. What caused this change in image? The answer to that question could fill a book. But one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of the transformation is the role played by the revelations made in 1967 and afterward that, for the previous two decades, the CIA had been secretly funding a large number of organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose purpose, in whole or part, was to oppose the spread of Soviet influence in the West. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Khieu Samphan and Jacques Vergès, two old men with thin-rimmed glasses and thickened waists, were sitting on a floor mat, shoeless, having tea. It was late August 2006, in a room at the Renakse hotel, a converted colonial mansion in central Phnom Penh. Khieu, the former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and a Pol Pot loyalist to the end, was still free. But he was growing nervous as a UN-backed tribunal was ramping up its efforts to indict the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. So he had called on his old friend Vergès, defender of terrorists and tyrants. Khieu wore brown polyester pants, Vergès a beige linen suit. They called each other “Maître” and “Président” and reminisced about the time when they had no titles – their student days in Paris in the 1950s. And they strategised. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
