Every dog owner knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of “celebration” smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an anniversary, more an over-determined conjuncture. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Last month, the Supreme Court tossed out the case Alvarez v. Smith , a challenge to a portion of the asset forfeiture in Illinois that allows the government to keep seized property for up to six months before giving its owner a day in court. The Court declined to rule on the case after determining it to be moot—all of the parties had settled with the government by the time the case made it to Washington. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
And now for a sports roundup: in Angola in early January a gang of shooters sprays the bus carrying the national soccer team of Togo, killing three people in the process, and a local terrorist group announces that as long as the Africa Cup of Nations tournament is played on Angolan soil, fresh homicides will be committed. The member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) that have the task of hosting both the Cup of Nations and the soccer World Cup in Cape Town this summer are in disarray as a consequence of the dispute between Angola and Congo over the “security” aspects of these allegedly prestigious sporting events. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Since China began undertaking economic reforms in 1978, its economy has grown at a rate of nearly ten percent a year, and its per-capita GDP is now twelve times greater than it was three decades ago. Many analysts attribute the country’s economic success to its unconventional approach to economic policy — a combination of mixed ownership, basic property rights, and heavy government intervention. Time magazine’s former foreign editor, Joshua Cooper Ramo, has even given it a name: the Beijing consensus. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. Here’s PM’s 120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The cruel trick has been pulled on this benighted child by an agglomeration of foodies and educational reformers who are propelled by a vacuous if well-meaning ideology that is responsible for robbing an increasing number of American schoolchildren of hours they might other wise have spent reading important books or learning higher math (attaining the cultural achievements, in other words, that have lifted uncounted generations of human beings out of the desperate daily scrabble to wrest sustenance from dirt). <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
To some, this kind of surreal humour is side-splitting. Others are baffled by it and can’t even raise a smile. Yet despite the importance of humour to human psychology, it is only the advances in brain imaging during the past decade that have enabled neuroscientists to pin down how the brain reacts when a joke tickles us. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
On valentine’s day two years ago, Paul Wagner, a 40-year-old Philadelphia purchasing manager, gave Gail Tomas, a total stranger, his left kidney. Wagner met Tomas, a 65-year-old former opera singer, on the internet, at MatchingDonors.com. Her daughter had posted an ad asking some magnificent stranger to save her mother. “It was there that I read about a lady in my city, Philadelphia, who was desperate for help,” Wagner said. “It has been one of the best decisions I have ever made.” This story had a happy ending. Yet it unfolded amid controversy over whether ethical norms were violated. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Forget aid—people in the poorest countries like Haiti need new cities with different rules. And developed countries should be the ones that build them. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial “minder” whom I’ll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world’s most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As religious violence deepens in his home country, Nobel laureate and Nigerian political activist Wole Soyinka shares his unbridled thoughts on Islamic terrorism and why England is a “cesspit” with The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Goldman Sachs, the huge and hugely profitable investment bank, has become a symbol of the financial excesses that helped to bring on the current recession. Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Imagine that driving across town, you’ve fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You’re so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn’t there. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
These days, authoritarian regimes of all sorts find such “immensely facilitated means of communication” alarming, most especially the intellectual heirs of Marx who rule the People’s Republic of China. And nothing has facilitated communication more immensely than the spread the Internet across the globe in the past two decades. Now nearly 2 billion people use the Internet, some 400 million of them in China. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Imagine that your stockbroker – or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips – called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce. This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For years, the secrets to great teaching have seemed more like alchemy than science, a mix of motivational mumbo jumbo and misty-eyed tales of inspiration and dedication. But for more than a decade, one organization has been tracking hundreds of thousands of kids, and looking at why some teachers can move them three grade levels ahead in a year and others can’t. Now, as the Obama administration offers states more than $4 billion to identify and cultivate effective teachers, Teach for America is ready to release its data. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Anyone searching for the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficulty: the key terms of political theory now have a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings. Take the word “liberal”. In the US a liberal is usually someone with an overriding belief in state intervention as a cure for social problems and market inefficiencies. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It’s right and proper that the ad has its own high holy day which, as Robert Lipsyte points out, we call the Super Bowl. After all, the ad has so much to celebrate. It’s been the great colonizing force of our age. When I was younger, for a period, I subscribed to the trade magazine Advertising Age, not because I had anything to do with the business, but because I was fascinated by the fact that, no matter how obscure the subject, the ad had an interest in (and a perspective on) it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jihad can sound boring at first. That’s what Flagg Miller has discovered. For the past seven years, Mr. Miller, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of California at Davis, has been poring over hundreds of audio tapes that were part of Osama bin Laden’s personal collection. Some of the tapes feature jihadis making small talk, cooking breakfast, laughing at each other’s lame jokes—not exactly riveting material. But listen closely and they start to get interesting. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1831, French politician and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited the still growing United States, traveled widely and took copious notes. He assembled those notes in two volumes, published five years apart, titled “Democracy in America,” that are still studied and quoted today. The title “Stephen Fry in America” echoes de Tocqueville’s classic, but also puts the reader on notice that the ambition here is scaled back. This isn’t an attempt to understand America, Mr. Fry says, as much as to experience it. And it’s supposed to be as much a window into the author as subject. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Europe’s anti-Islam sentiment may be expressed most visibly in memoirs because Europeans have been reticent to condemn Islam—or religion more generally—outright. Americans, however, seem to prefer a less subtle approach. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Once upon a time, the United States had a president known for a peculiar facial display. In an act of controlled emotion, he would bite his lower lip and tell his audience, “I feel your pain.” Whether the display was sincere is not the issue here; how we are affected by another’s predicament is. Empathy is second nature to us, so much so that anyone devoid of it strikes us as dangerous or mentally ill. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Last week I was a juror in the trial of a man accused of selling a $10 bag of heroin to an undercover police officer. At the end of the two days of testimony, I concluded that the defendant was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. I also concluded that he should be acquitted. In my mind, it came down to a simple, unsettling question: Is it worse to let a drug dealer go free, or to reward the police for lying under oath? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Who shall guide us in the art of the tweet? Not, as has been suggested, Ernest Hemingway: His style should be measured in the overall effect of his paragraphs, not in the length of his sentences. Still, the common view that Hemingway wrote sentences that were short and simple has received a more general fillip by those who elevate Anglo-Saxon as a model for clarity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
