Enthralling conversation about the future between Harari, a historian of human life, and Kahneman, the father of behavioural economics. Begins with an exchange of pleasantries, then takes off: “The basic process is the decoupling of intelligence from consciousness. The military and economic and political system doesn’t really need consciousness. It needs intelligence. And intelligence is a far easier thing than consciousness”
Director Errol Morris has directed six short films for ESPN collective titled "It's Not Crazy, It's Sports." The films will air on March 1 and then be released online during the following week. The trailer:
The films' subjects include Mr. Met, streakers, sports memorabilia fanatics, an electric football league, and Michael Jordan's stolen jersey. I'll post the films here as they're released online. Morris previously did a film for ESPN about the sports-themed funerals of die-hard fans.
I’m working through a number of different theories about why “House of Cards” is so profoundly wrong about American politics while still being a rather entertaining and addictive show. Maybe it’s actually a comedy. Maybe it’s being written by an evil political scientist who knows full well how the American political system works but is aggressively (and most effectively) trolling other political scientists.
I completely agree: fantastically unrealistic politics, incredibly entertaining.
My rule of thumb: any political show, spy novel, or detective story with a devious and complicated plan that comes to fruition was written by someone who has never, ever tried to implement a devious complicated plan.
As recounted by Malcolm Gladwell in 2013's David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, [Amos] Tversky's peers thought so highly of him that they devised a tongue-in-cheek one-part test for measuring intelligence. As related to Gladwell by psychologist Adam Alter, the Tversky Intelligence Test was "The faster you realized Tversky was smarter than you, the smarter you were."
Early on in Mean Girls, Janis gives Cady—a 16-year-old who, having just returned to the U.S. after 12 years in Africa, is unfamiliar with the workings of the typical American high school—a brief guide to the Darwinian jungle that is the lunchroom of North Shore High. “You got,” Janis explains, solemnly, “your freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, JV jocks, Asian nerds, cool Asians, varsity jocks, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don't eat anything, desperate wannabes, burnouts, sexually active band geeks …”
“Sexually active band geeks”! That—a category within a category within a category, winking in its regression—is classic Tina Fey: a small joke made big through a sweeping insight. We are, after all, taught to do with people exactly what Janis is teaching Cady to do: to classify them, instantly and thoughtlessly, according to their clothes and their hair and their size and the people they sit with in the cafeteria.
We’re also taught, of course, to respect the obvious: that appearances are not everything, that what people are and who they are are only very loosely connected. The tension those dueling messages create—our desire to fit in, straining against our desire to stand out—is why Louis Vuitton and Sephora and Soul Cycle and Facebook exist; it also, however, gives structure to our media. Movies and TV shows (not to mention comics and novels and other, more traditional forms of literature) have long relied on familiar categories—the wacky sidekick, the charming nerd—to telegraph characters’ motivations and statuses with economy. Fey’s own creations, from Mean Girls (the Plastics!) to 30 Rock (Jenna Maroney!), have themselves alternately mocked and made use of those archetypes.
So does Fey’s latest, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (released last Friday on Netflix), which is a delightful comedy with a dark premise: a girl, kidnapped at 14 and kept in an underground bunker for 15 years, getting on with her life—in New York City, no less—after being rescued. The show’s universe, a New York defined by tourists and hedge-funders, is populated by people who could be the grown-up versions of the kids in North Shore’s cafeteria: humans who might well, at first glance, be mistaken for archetypes.
There’s Titus Andromedon (Gay Best Friend), who loves musical theater, fluorescent accessories, and snappy one-liners. There’s Jacqueline Voorhees (Self-Obsessed Rich Lady), who treats spin classes as religious experiences and insists that her son’s birthday cake be paleo. There’s Xanthippe Voorhees (Self-Obsessed Rich Teenager), whose preferred method of communication is the eye-roll. There’s Lillian (Quirky Landlady), a life-long New Yorker with hippie hair. There’s Dong (Hard-Working Recent Immigrant), who is struggling as much with his new life as with his command of English. There’s Kimmy herself, who falls, both because of and despite her traumatic backstory, squarely into the expansive category of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
At its most basic, Unbreakable subscribes to the auto-tuned premise of its impossibly catchy intro song. These characters are, indeed, characters: They're people who are also media figures, people who are seen and consumed and then, for the most part, forgotten. (“Thank you, victims!” a Today Show producer chirps at Kimmy and her three fellow “Mole Women” as they leave the studio after an interview. “Thank you, victims,” he says again, impatiently, shoving them out the door, the time he has allotted to caring about them having expired.) For Fey and Unbreakable’s co-creator, Robert Carlock, it would have been easy to take the show’s premise—a fresh-from-the-bunker girl-woman, brushing elbows with New York’s one percent—and turn the whole thing into a kind of live-action cartoon. That strategy worked well for 30 Rock, allowing the pair to get away with jokes (about, among other things, gender politics and racial politics) that a more earnest narrative approach would have precluded. They could have easily plumbed their new show’s insta-themes—fish-out-of-water! time travel! self-reinvention! the aching absurdities of #diblasiosnewyork!—for sketch comedy’s superficial brand of humor.
Unbreakable takes the easy categories of lunchroom and life and complicates them.
To an extent, certainly, they did do that: Unbreakable might well have more jokes per capita, and per minute, than any sitcom ever made, 30 Rock very much included.
Unbreakable, though, doesn’t stop at sketch. Instead, it takes the easy categories of lunchroom and life and insistently complicates them, taking tropes and turning them, through comedy’s alchemy, into people. Kimmy, we quickly learn, is neither a victim nor a spectacle nor a 13-going-on-30 dreamgirl; she’s a smart, kind, principled, and resilient woman whose sing-song-y cheeriness, as my colleague Lenika Cruz put it, "is a necessary façade for her inner pain." Dong is making difficult choices between learning English—and, by extension, fitting into his new world—and earning the money that offers another kind of status. Lillian, Kimmy's hippie-haired landlady, is making stilted peace with the fact that the only home she has ever known—her New York neighborhood—is rapidly evolving away from her. Jacqueline is similarly struggling: with a crumbling marriage, a family she has abandoned, and a wealth-inflected strain of Friedanian ennui. Xanthippe is trying to find her place in the New York City of the youthful one percent, with all its Gossip Girlesque overtones, while dealing with the inconvenient fact that she is actually a good kid. Titus (né Ronald Wilkerson, in Chickasaw County, Mississippi) is doing what we all must, at one point or another: coming to terms with the death of a dream.
On the one hand, sure, Unbreakable's what-they-are versus who-they-are discrepancies are the stuff of sitcomic cliché: People are more than they seem, and books are more than their covers, and special snowflakes and unique butterflies and the containment of multitudes and all that. And the wacky humanity of the familiar stranger has, of course, been celebrated across TV’s history, from Ralph Kramden to Doug Heffernan to Mindy Lahiri. In that sense, Unbreakable is, despite its status as a "Netflix show," quite traditional.
In another sense, though, Unbreakable is productively innovative. This is Gatsby, in its way, for the age of Facebook and "The End of Men." Everyone has secrets. Everyone has pasts. Everyone is struggling and aching and wanting, trying to be, and also not be, normal; characters' wildly different interpretations of what that normalcy entails, however, suggest that monolithic fit-innery, the stuff of high school cafeterias, is finally outdated.
Unbreakable doesn’t simply flesh out its characters; it actively and insistently offers the limelight to characters who would, in so many other contexts, play merely supporting roles. Characters who would, in other words, otherwise be marginalized. “Black, gay, and old?” Titus laments as he walks down the street in a Cosby-esque sweater. “Oh, I'm not even going to know which box to check on the hate crime form.” Which is—classic Fey— a small joke made big through a sweeping insight. And yet we’re hearing it from Titus’ perspective, and, because we know him, we’re able to put it into the context of Titus’ experience as a struggler and a survivor. Same with Dong and Lillian and so many of the other inhabitants of Kimmy's world. Unbreakable isn’t just a show about underdogs; it’s a show about giving voice to the voiceless. It is a show that celebrates the people who are often, in life, made to live in the margins.
We live in an age newly obsessed with otherness, with new platforms for curiosity, and within it, empathy.
And that makes it particularly apt for the moment we’re in—a moment that, you could argue, is finding new platforms for empathy. We live in an age newly obsessed with otherness, an age in which “What It’s Like to Be X” is a common headline in news stories and “Ask Me Anything” is a popular rubric on reddit. We have Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest and the “Real Housewives” franchise, and those, on top of everything else, have given us new insights into the vast diversity of human experience. We have new platforms for curiosity and, within it, empathy. We have The Wire and Breaking Bad and Orange Is the New Black—shows told from the perspective of people who are, in important ways, far removed from the norm-happy collectives of sitcomic tradition.
And now we have Unbreakable, a show that has many ridiculous characters, but that saves the brunt of its ridicule for the ones who would normally find themselves above mockery—in the context of sitcoms, yes, but also in the context of life. As ThinkProgress’s Jessica Goldstein points out, there are precious few white men on the show; the ones who are there are pretty much there to be mocked. There’s Julian Voorhees, the smarmy hedge-funder; Logan Beekman, the Connecticut trust-funder so wealthy that his parents trained him to have a British accent; and, of course, Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Kimmy’s kidnapper and the founder of Savior Rick’s Spooky Church of the Scary-pocalypse, who is given a ridiculous name and an even more ridiculous man-mullet, but even more importantly robbed of a backstory that puts his absurdity into context.
Unbreakable has come in for criticism about its treatment of characters like Titus and Dong and Kimmy’s fellow "Mole Woman," Donna Maria. (The show, as the Daily Dot’s Feliks Garcia summed it up, “has a race problem.”) And it’s true that the show features many cringe-worthy moments, among them jokes about Dong’s name, jokes about Dong’s command of English, and jokes about Jacqueline’s secret past as a Native American. And it’s true, too, as Garcia points out, that one of the characters who would seem ripe for fleshing out—Donna Maria—gets very little in the way of screen time. It's also true, however, that some of the show's race-related jokes land brilliantly. (“White Women Found,” runs the chyron of the Mole Women news story in the shows first episode. In smaller text: “Hispanic woman also found.”) And a second season will afford opportunities for more characters to get their due.
Unbreakable, for all its flaws, creates a universe in which the biggest disservice that can be done to characters is to rob them of their stories. And that’s a pretty good metaphor for the universe the rest of us inhabit—one that is newly defined by an awareness of the range of human experience and a respect for the power of diversity. The auto-tuned words of the show’s introduction—“they alive, dammit!”—are in that sense not just a statement, but a rallying cry. Because females, the show suggests—and all the other people who are revealing themselves after living, for so long, in the shadows—are strong as hell.
A nice excerpt starts with language difficulties in Michigan, which remind him of his early years in Sweden:
In those early years, every time I met people from Norway, I felt relief. They only had to say a few sentences, and at once I could place them geographically and socially and address them accordingly. When I was still living in Norway, I wasn’t even aware that this kind of knowledge existed, it was entirely intuitive and obvious, just part of what being Norwegian entailed, and my easy access to this whole subconscious mountain of implicit knowledge and shared references was probably what it meant to have a national identity.
Once, I mentioned this to a Swedish woman. She looked indignantly at me. “But those are just prejudices!” she said. “You’re judging people before you’ve even spoken to them! It’s much better not to know all those things, so that you can make up your own opinion about them. We’re individuals, not representatives of a culture!”
That is the most Swedish thing anyone has ever said to me.
What is culture, if not a set of prejudices? A set of unformulated and unconscious rules and ways of behavior that every member of a given society nonetheless immediately recognizes and accepts?
Nowhere in the world has shared culture been a more imperative requirement than in America. More than 300 million people live here, and they had descended over the course of a very few generations from a huge number of disparate cultures, with different histories, ways of behavior, worldviews and experiential backgrounds. All of them, sooner or later, had been required to relinquish their old culture and enter the new one. That must be why the most striking thing about the United States was its sameness, that every place had the same hotels, the same restaurants, the same stores. And that must be why every American movie was made after the same template and why, in this sense, every movie expressed the same thing. And that must be why all these TVs were hanging on the walls, unwatched; they created an immediate sense of belonging, a feeling of home.
In the conventional story, development is a field dominated by “modernizers,” whose hubristic efforts result in catastrophic consequences for those they were designed to benefit: think everything from hydraulic dams that displace thousands of residents to agricultural rationing that leads to famine.
But community development—“development without modernization,” in the words of one of its advocates—was just as central as modernization to mid-century development strategies. The automatic moral outrage inherent in what Immerwahr calls the “Modernization Comes to Town” story has overshadowed the problems of grassroots, decentralized approaches, which have received less critical scrutiny and an implicitly favorable assessment from scholars.
Unfortunately, far from eliminating deprivation and attacking the social status quo, bottom-up community development projects often reinforced them. And today, Immerwahr argues, “the new wave of communitarianism has been carried out in near-total ignorance of the global community development campaign that preceded it by only a few decades.” This is a history with real stakes. If that prior campaign’s record is as checkered as Thinking Small argues, then its intellectual descendants must do some serious rethinking.
Some miscellaneous thoughts, noting that I have not read the book:
The thrust of the argument, I believe, is that grassroots development projects have generally been less coherent, less successful, and more likely to get hijacked by local elites than the enthusiasts would believe. And because this is a book about history (the US, India and Philippines) it’s obligated to say that this has all happened before, and no one is learning from past failure.
A lot of the community development promoted by big players, from Mohammed Yunus to the World Bank, feels more like astroturf than grassroots development. I think there’s a difference.
You could read this as anti-Jim Scott and anti-Bill Easterly, but I get the sense they are saying the same thing: large-scale localized development schemes (astroturf) are just another utopian solution to complex problems, and in the end it’s hard to escape the pattern of development as the subjugation of the poor by the powerful and the state.
I also don’t read a lot into project failures. Absent some fairly rapid industrial change in the center of the country, and a huge increase in labor demand over a generation, I find it hard to believe that community development projects can accomplish a lot. Steering isn’t very helpful if you’re not moving.
I am persuaded enough to buy the book, and I look forward to assigning it (or the article) and outraging my Master’s students—partly because of the argument, and especially if I ask them to read a whole book.
Alex Tabarrok dissects the incredible Department of Justice Report on Ferguson. Truly astonishing things: $321 in fines and fees and 3 warrants per household, a parking ticket leading to multiple arrests and jailings. Much of it pursuit of revenue.
The abuse in Ferguson shouldn’t really surprise us–this is how most governments behave most of the time. Democracy constrains what governments do but it’s a thin constraint easily capable of being pierced when stressed.
The worst abuses of government happen when an invading gang conquer people of a different race, religion and culture. What happened in Ferguson was similar only the rulers stayed the same and the population of the ruled changed. In 1990 Ferguson was 74% white and 25% black. Just 20 years later the percentages had nearly inverted, 29% white and 67% black. The population of rulers, however, changed more slowly so white rulers found themselves overlording a population that was foreign to them. As a result, democracy broke down and government as usual, banditry and abuse, broke out.
Incidentally, when we look across countries over time, one of the most reliable predictors of state failure and conflict are ethnically-factionalized quasi-democracies.
Dormie gets pawprinted before his trial. (Library of Congress)
The war between dogs and cats has raged on for centuries. But in 1921, the courts decided to take a stand in the age-old conflict.
That year, a defendant named Dormie went on trial with the highest possible stakes: his life. He was an Airedale dog, and he was on trial for killing 14 cats.
The catslaughter was a serious charge, with alleged victims that included Sunbeam, a beloved Persian cat, and many other neighborhood felines. According to the prosecution, Dormie slipped under the hedge fence, seized Sunbeam by the "fat scruff" of her neck, and shook the cat to death. Witnesses identified Dormie clearly — Marjorie Ingals, owner of Sunbeam the cat, was forced to pick out the dog in a canine roundup.
There was some suspicion that Dormie was targeted for trial because his owner, Eaton McMillan, was a wealthy automobile dealer. The dog's aristocratic background may have made him a target: the Chicago Tribune joked that Dormie's trial would "expose the inner secrets of the upper strata of dogdom."
Ultimately, it didn't matter. The trial ended with a hung jury, with 11 jurors voting to acquit, while only 1 wanted the dog to go to the pound gas chamber. Dormie walked free.
Papers had fun with the trial, taking the opportunity to make lots of jokes about the contemporaneous legal troubles of film star Fatty Arbuckle. The law was the result of a San Francisco ordinance that held both dog and master to be liable for any crimes the dog committed. The master could escape with a fine, but the dog would be tried for life. Though laws obviously vary significantly by location, they aren't that different today — if an animal destroys property, including other animals, it's usually easy to charge them and have them killed. It just probably won't go to a jury trial.
Why did an animal go on trial? Has it happened before?
The execution of a sow.
Today, the cost of animal trials tends to be prohibitive, so they rarely occur unless something truly consequential occurs.
In 1924, Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinochet led proceedings against a dog that killed his cat, and he found the dog guilty. As Jen Gergen describes, Pinochet sentenced it to life imprisonment at the Philadelphia State Penitentiary. In 1927, another dog was tried and found guilty for "worrying the cat of a neighbor lady."
And it's not just dogs. Gergen notes that in the 1920s, an Indiana chimpanzee was arrested for smoking a cigarette in public. Also in the 1920s, bulls were tried — in the "court of bovine justice" — to determine if they were fit to breed. During those trials, bulls actually went on the stand.
Most animal trials, however, are a relic of a different legal system. E.P. Evans' The Criminal Prosecution and Punishment of Animalsfeatures centuries-old examples of rats on trial for eating food, insects tried for being pests, and pigs hung for murdering children. Most of these trials, however, reflected a legal system that was still negotiating boundaries between religious and secular law, and such trials faded as legal procedure became more set.
As far as Dormie goes, we may never know if he was guilty or if some other animal killed Sunbeam. It's telling that the prosecution only accused the dog and never deigned to call a suspicious squirrel to the stand.
(Thanks to Josh Preston for tweeting about Dormie's dramatic trial.)
For their new ad campaign, Apple gathered some photos that people had taken with their iPhones and are featuring them on their website and on billboards. Here are a few I found particularly engaging.
I've said it before and it's just getting more obvious: the iPhone is the best camera in the world.
March is going to be a good month for new streaming titles — you're just going to have to wait a little bit to get to the best stuff. That's particularly true for Netflix, which is adding a bunch of great titles, but only in the second half of the month. (The first half of the final season of Mad Men only gets added to the service on March 22, only two weeks before the final batch of episodes begins to unspool on AMC.)
Yet there are plenty of good titles coming, and even a few available right now. Here's a quick look at five movies and TV shows worth watching on various streaming services this March.
This amazing documentary was added in the second half of February. If you haven't seen it, you need to watch it immediately. It made my top 10 films of 2014 list, and with good reason.
Jesse Moss's film begins in a simple place — there's a massive influx of men coming to North Dakota to work in the booming oil industry there, when there simply aren't enough jobs to accommodate them all. So Lutheran pastor Jay Reinke decides to open up his church to these men, to give them a place to sleep. It's not really a conscious decision for him. It's simply an extension of what he sees as his Christian charity.
Of course, charity is all well and good, but in Reinke's case, it bumps up against the fact that he is also part of a local community that doesn't terribly want these men — many of whom have criminal records — hanging around its fringes constantly. By giving them a place to sleep, Reinke thinks he's helping them stay off the streets. Yet in the eyes of the town, he's giving them a place that keeps them in the city.
It's an impossible situation, and Moss patiently watches as things build to a breaking point, then finally shatter. It's an incredible film, riveting and heartbreaking.
One of the best reasons to subscribe to Amazon Prime is to have access to many of the best shows Comedy Central has to offer. Drunk History isn't at the pinnacle of the channel's offerings, but when you need something that will just make you laugh really hard, there are few better offerings.
The premise is simple. Comedians and other generally funny people get drunk. Then, they try to recall some major event from history, with actors re-enacting what they talk about. The actors lip-sync in time with the drunken retelling, and what ensues is somewhere between History Channel documentary and historical society re-enactment.
All the while, the editing and other technical elements add to the fun, creating a sense of rolling goofiness, that sweeps everything along in its wake.
Did you know there was a movie featuring a love triangle among Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, and Robert Stack? Well, there is, and this is it. It's also a deeply funny movie and a surprisingly adept World War II thriller, set in Nazi-occupied Poland and filmed during the depths of the war.
In truth, To Be or Not to Be was greeted with a somewhat muted reception when it arrived in theaters in early 1942. The film made dark satire out of Hitler and the horrors that were engulfing Europe at the time, and many felt it was a bridge too far to actually mock the man America was at war with.
However, To Be or Not to Be has endured as a comedy classic, for one simple reason — it's endlessly funny, but it also cares deeply about its characters, who find themselves struggling to survive and express themselves in a world gone to hell. It's one of the finest films from director Ernst Lubitsch, who is one of the finest comedy directors of all time.
Director Alex Ross Perry has crafted an acid-black comedy with this 2014 release, which follows a writer struggling with his creative process, with the passage of time, and with his relationships. Jason Schwartzman stars as the "Philip" of the title, with Elisabeth Moss as his girlfriend, Ashley, and Jonathan Pryce as his literary idol, Ike.
Perry's movie won't be for everyone — for starters, Philip can be a singularly unpleasant presence — but the movie's literary qualities and the way it plays around with the passage of time make it more than worth checking out. And for those who can brave Philip's worst moments, the movie offers impressive depth and nuance. This is a film that really understands the struggles both of artists and of those who find themselves unlucky enough to be in love with artists.
The life of film critic Roger Ebert is the subject of this wonderful biographical documentary that celebrates not just film and criticism but, well, life itself.
Documentarian Steve James (Hoop Dreams) was lucky enough to interview Ebert several times in the months before the writer died, and those interviews form the spine of this film, which is loosely based on Ebert's memoir but also encompasses the entirety of his career. Along the way, James touches on Ebert's work with fellow critic Gene Siskel, his rise to fame, and his ultimate status as a beloved cultural icon.
This list is filled with projects that look at the darker side of life (and, okay, Drunk History), no matter how sardonically. But Life Itself will remind you of the wonders of life, something that's arguably even harder to do well. Not bad for a movie about a critic.
Life Itself will be available on Netflix Instant beginning Thursday, March 19.
Two style policemen debate correct English. Simon Heffer and Oliver Kamm, who both write regularly on language and grammar, disagree over the balance between correctness and permissiveness. Heffer argues that rules make correct English, defined by being reliably clear and accessible. Kamm thinks that many of the “rules” of English grammar are petty obsessions with the unimportant. Both write carefully disciplined prose
We investigate the empirical relationship between ethnicity and culture, defined as a vector of traits reflecting norms, attitudes and preferences. Using surveys of individual values in 76 countries, we find that ethnic identity is a significant predictor of cultural values, yet that within-group variation in culture trumps between-group variation. Thus, in contrast to a commonly held view, ethnic and cultural diversity are unrelated. We explore the correlates of cultural diversity and of the overlap between culture and ethnicity, finding that the level of economic development is positively associated with cultural diversity and negatively associated with the overlap between culture and ethnicity. Finally, although only a small portion of a country's overall cultural heterogeneity occurs between groups, this does not imply that cultural differences between groups are irrelevant. Indeed, we find that civil conflict becomes more likely when there is greater overlap between ethnicity and culture.
We introduce a simple, easy to implement instrument for jointly eliciting risk and ambiguity attitudes. Using this instrument, we structurally estimate a two-parameter model of preferences. Our findings indicate that ambiguity aversion is significantly overstated when risk neutrality is assumed. This highlights the interplay between risk and ambiguity attitudes as well as the importance of joint estimation. In addition, over our stakes levels we find no difference in the estimated parameters when incentives are real or hypothetical, raising the possibility that a simple hypothetical question can provide insights into an individuals preferences over ambiguity in such economic environments.
Urban ecologists have extended the bounds of this field to incorporate both the effects of human activities on ecological processes (e.g., humans as generators of disturbances), and the ways in which the structures, functions, and processes of urban ecosystems, and human alterations to them, in turn alter people's behavior. This feedback loop from the perspective of urban ecologists offers a natural connection to economic models for human behavior. At their core, housing markets reveal price signals that communicate to developers the tradeoffs consumers are willing to make for the private characteristics of homes and the attributes of the neighborhoods where they are located. These signals together with local land use rules guide the location of development. The characteristics of this development in turn influence the functioning and evolution of urban ecosystems. This paper describes markets as coordination mechanisms and conveyors of information from a complex adaptive systems perspective. It also discusses the way in which physical and biological processes, infrastructural boundaries, and the institutional equivalent of "barbed wire" all simultaneously act to shape the transmission of ecosystem services over the landscape. These processes alter the spatial distribution of housing prices in ways that are both continuous and discrete.
What I saw, as I looked through the voluminous BuzzFeed coverage of the dress, is an organization at the peak of a craft they've been honing since 2006. They are masters of the form they pioneered. If you think that's bullshit, that's fine -- I think most things are bullshit too. But they didn't just serendipitously figure out that blue dress. They created an organization that could identify that blue dress, document it, and capture the traffic. And the way they got that 25 million impressions, as far as I can tell from years of listening to their people, reading them, writing about them, and not working or writing for them, was something like: Build a happy-enough workplace where people could screw around and experiment with what works and doesn't, and pay everyone some money.
This is not said as an endorsement of BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed is utterly deserving of insanely paranoid criticism just like anyone who makes money from your attention, including me. But it's worth pointing out that their recipe for traffic seems to be: Hire tons of people; let them experiment, figure out how social media works, and repeat endlessly; with lots of snacks. Robots didn't make this happen. It was a hint of magic, and some science.
Legend has it that Pablo Picasso was sketching in the park when a bold woman approached him.
"It's you -- Picasso, the great artist! Oh, you must sketch my portrait! I insist."
So Picasso agreed to sketch her. After studying her for a moment, he used a single pencil stroke to create her portrait. He handed the women his work of art.
"It's perfect!" she gushed. "You managed to capture my essence with one stroke, in one moment. Thank you! How much do I owe you?"
"Five thousand dollars," the artist replied.
"B-b-but, what?" the woman sputtered. "How could you want so much money for this picture? It only took you a second to draw it!"
To which Picasso responded, "Madame, it took me my entire life."
Similarly, designer Paula Scher took only a few seconds to come up with the new logo for Citibank for which Pentagram likely charged big money for:
How can it be that you talk to someone and it's done in a second? But it is done in a second. it's done in a second and in 34 years, and every experience and every movie and every thing of my life that's in my head.
Ford is exactly right about BuzzFeed; they put in the work for years so that a post that took probably 3 minutes to write captured more traffic in one day than some media outlets get in an entire month. (thx, @DigDoug & @jayfallon)
Update:A post from BuzzFeed's publisher, Dao Nguyen, explains how the company's tech team reacted to the unexpected traffic.
We have a bunch of things going for us at this point. We have heavily invested in infrastructure provisioning and scaling. We know exactly how to scale fast from running drills.
Weirdly, I saw the dress as gold and a light blue. What a fucking cliche I am, needing to see even this dress as a different set of colors than anyone else.↩
I don't think I'm betraying any confidences here in saying that BuzzFeed had to spin up a few extra servers to handle the intense burst of traffic from that post...everyone does it. That's right, dedicated #TheDress servers. Move over, Bieber.↩
For Scientific American, Jen Christiansen tracks down where the iconic image on the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures came from. Designer Peter Saville found the image, a stacked graph of successive radio signals from pulsar CP 1919, in a 1977 astronomy encyclopedia but it actually originated in a 1970 Ph.D. thesis.
By now I had also combed through early discovery articles in scientific journals and every book anthology on pulsars I could get my hands on to learn more about early pulsar visualizations. The more I learned, the more this descriptor in the 1971 Ostriker caption began to feel significant; "computer-generated illustration." The charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970's. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output. One PhD thesis title from that group in particular caught my attention, "Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars," by Harold D. Craft, Jr. (September 1970).
When a star gets old and fat, it explodes in a supernova, leaving a neutron star in its wake. Neutron stars are heavily magnetized and incredibly dense, approximately two times the mass of the Sun packed into an area the size of the borough of Queens. That's right around the density of an atomic nucleus, which isn't surprising given that neutron stars are mostly composed of neutrons. A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh billions of tons.
A pulsar is a neutron star that quickly rotates. As the star spins, electromagnetic beams are shot out of the magnetic poles, which sweep around in space like a lighthouse light. Pulsars can spin anywhere from once every few seconds to 700 times/second, with the surface speed approaching 1/4 of the speed of light. These successive waves of electromagnetic pulses, arriving every 1.34 seconds, are what's depicted in the stacked graph. Metaphorical meanings of its placement on the cover of a Joy Division record are left as an exercise to the reader.
That is the new Robert D. Putnam book and it focuses on the widening opportunity gap among America’s young. Much of the work is narrative and case studies, starting with Port Clinton, Ohio but not stopping there. Any Putnam book is an event, and this one is the natural sequel to Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. The writing and the underlying intelligence are of an extremely high quality.
One significant theme is that upward mobility results from a mingling of the upper and lower income classes, and such mingling is more scarce than in the immediate postwar era. You can think of it as case study evidence for the cross-sectional statistical regularities stressed by Chetty et.al. Contra Chetty, however, Putnam believes that declines in socioeconomic mobility will start to show up in the data as current generations age.
The book’s problem is finding a new note to strike. Putnam stresses this is a story of social forces rather than personal villains, but, for all the merits of his text, he identifies no new culprits or solutions. Inequality of opportunity seems to have more to do with parents than schools, but how to control parents? This book does not flirt with the so-called Neoreaction. Putnam favors increased access to contraception, professional coaching of poor parents, prison sentencing reform and more emphasis on rehabilitation, eliminating fees for school extracurricular activities, mentoring programs, and greater investment in vocational education; contra Krugman he gives a lot of evidence for skills mismatch (pp.232-233). More generally, he asks for federalist solutions and lots of experimentation. Maybe those are good paths to go, but the reader feels (once again) that matters will get worse before they get better. There is very little on either political economy or the evolution of technology.
Do read this book, but by the end Putnam himself seems to come away deflated from dealing with some of America’s toughest problems.
This is perhaps the first real crack in the wall for the almost-universal use of the null hypothesis significance testing procedure (NHSTP). The journal, Basic and Applied Social Psychology (BASP), has banned the use of NHSTP and related statistical procedures from their journal. They previously had stated that use of these statistical methods was no longer required but can be optional included. Now they have proceeded to a full ban.
The type of analysis being banned is often called a frequentist analysis, and we have been highly critical in the pages of SBM of overreliance on such methods. This is the iconic p-value where <0.05 is generally considered to be statistically significant.
There is more here, with further interesting points in the piece, via Mark Thorson.
In Japan, flour companies have different divisions that make flour for noodles. In general, this flour is milled as much as ten times more finely than it is here. The flour doesn’t need to be as absorbent here in the U.S.—it’s primarily for bread production. So there’s not as much of a reason to mill it as fine. The result is that it’s harder to make a proper ramen noodle here, since the flour is just not fine enough.
Relative to pasta, ramen noodles are on the low end of the water-content spectrum—some can contain as little as 26 percent water. ... The more refined your flour, the better it will bind with water, and the better the texture of the final noodle.
When I talk to our flour salesman in Tokyo, I can say, “I’m thinking about making a tsukemen noodle, and I want it to be aromatic and have a chew,” and he’ll send me samples that make sense. Then we can talk on the phone and I can say, “I want my ash content to be a bit lower or higher” or “I want to be able to see more or less of the grain color in the noodle.” I can really talk to them and have a super intellectual conversation, and at the end of the day you’re able to make a really good product.
This is all to say that when I came back to New York, I felt like making my own noodles would be too big of a challenge. I had already met Ken Uki, of Sun Noodle, and I had worked with him a little bit. He’d done a really good job; they run a really professional operation. So I decided to take making noodles off of my plate. ...
In Japan, you can get great chicken fat for cheap. It’s orange and it doesn’t taste funky—it almost tastes like chicken soup. ...
You can’t get good chicken fat here in the States. A USDA plant needs approval for each part of the animal they want to use: necks, wings, heads, whatever. A guy at one of the chicken farms we use says he throws all his chicken fat away; it’s too much of a hassle to get it USDA approved, and nobody wants to buy it.
So I use whatever I can get. It’s not bad. It’s good, but it’s not as delicious. At the shop, people are like, You could use Flying Pigs Farms or whatever, and it’s like, Yeah, but they want $15 per pound for their birds. Then they’ll say, Why don’t you use pastured, sustainable, organic meat? And I’m like, Will you pay $25 per bowl of ramen?
That is the new and forthcoming book from Richard H. Thaler, due out in May. It is excellent and fascinating, and yes even if you have read all of the other popular books on behavioral economics you should read this one too.
The title is good but I find the subtitle even more alluring. For me the very best parts of the book are about Thaler’s career as an economist. Indeed much of the book traces the development of behavioral economics through a biographical lens. Here is one excerpt:
…my thesis advisor, Sherwin Rosen, gave the following as an assessment of my career as a graduate student: “We did not expect much of him.”
And:
I spent a fair amount of time staring at the List and adding new items, but I did not know what to do with it. “Dumb stuff people do” is not a satisfactory title for an academic paper.
Other figures of note make cameo appearances in the book, including Cass Sunstein and John Lott.
The German army has faced a shortage of equipment for years, but the situation has recently become so precarious that some soldiers took matters into their own hands.
On Tuesday, German broadcaster ARD revealed that German soldiers tried to hide the lack of arms by replacing heavy machine guns with broomsticks during a NATO exercise last year. After painting the wooden sticks black, the German soldiers swiftly attached them to the top of armored vehicles, according to a confidential army report which was leaked to ARD.
…To make matters worse, the broom-equipped German soldiers belong to a crucial, joint NATO task force and would be the first to be deployed in case of an attack.
The animals in the ocean have been getting bigger, on average, since the Cambrian period – and not by chance.
That is the finding of a huge new survey of marine life past and present, published in the journal Science.
It describes a pattern of increasing body size that cannot be explained by random “drift”, but suggests bigger animals generally fare better at sea.
In the past 542 million years, the average size of a marine animal has gone up by a factor of 150.
It appears that the explosion of different life forms near the start of that time window eventually skewed decisively towards bulkier animals.
Today’s tiniest sea critter is less than 10 times smaller than its Cambrian counterpart, measured in terms of volume; both are minuscule crustaceans. But at the other end of the scale, the mighty blue whale is more than 100,000 times the size of the largest animal the Cambrian could offer: another crustacean with a clam-like, hinged shell.
The writer and neurologist learns that he has terminal cancer, and considers how best to spend the months remaining to him. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming. These are no longer my business; they belong to the future”
When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of this strategy, we demonstrate that people often prefer potential rather than achievement when evaluating others. Indeed, compared with references to achievement (e.g., “this person has won an award for his work”), references to potential (e.g., “this person could win an award for his work”) appear to stimulate greater interest and processing, which can translate into more favorable reactions. This tendency creates a phenomenon whereby the potential to be good at something can be preferred over actually being good at that very same thing. We document this preference for potential in laboratory and field experiments, using targets ranging from athletes to comedians to graduate school applicants and measures ranging from salary allocations to online ad clicks to admission decisions.
This paper explores the relationship between government size and economic freedom, relating these patterns to theories of fiscal politics. In order to address current political controversies, it uses data on pre-1990 OECD members (minus Norway) for central government tax revenues and spending, as well as indicators of economic freedom derived from the Fraser Institute, ICRG, Heritage Foundation, and the World Bank. It finds that it matters a great deal whether we define size as expenditures or taxation. Spending has no relationship with freedom, or a negative one, across this data set. Initial tax revenue levels, however, positively predict subsequent changes in economic freedom. We find similar patterns using different measures of economic freedom and whether we use annual data (1995-2010) or overlapping six-year averages going back to 1970-75. These results challenge the common preconception that taxes and economic freedom are negatively related. In addition, the divergence between tax revenue and spending in this regard is more consistent with a “fiscal contract” model of the state, in which taxation and economic freedom go together, as governments attend to their legitimacy and the health of the private sector in order to increase revenue, but flag in these efforts when they enjoy sources of income other than taxes.
The huge personal disappointment—and it puzzled me for a long time—was that junior professors did not, by and large, give us work I wanted to print. I knew their professional work was good. These were brilliant thinkers and writers. Yet the problems I encountered, I hasten to say, were absolutely not those of academic stereotype—not esotericism, specialization, jargon, the “inability” to address a nonacademic audience. The embarrassing truth was rather the opposite. When these brilliant people contemplated writing for the “public,” it seemed they merrily left difficulty at home, leapt into colloquial language with both feet, added unnatural (and frankly unfunny) jokes, talked about TV, took on a tone chummy and unctuous. They dumbed down, in short—even with the most innocent intentions. The public, even the “general reader,” seemed to mean someone less adept, ingenious, and critical than themselves. Writing for the public awakened the slang of mass media. The public signified fun, frothy, friendly. And it is certainly true that even in many supposedly “intellectual” but debased outlets of the mass culture, talking down to readers in a colorless fashion-magazine argot is such second nature that any alternative seems out of place.
That is from Mark Greif, an editor and founder of n+1. He says actually that graduate students do much better than the junior professors.
