Is There a New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?. "Is there a new anti-intellectualism? I mean one that is advocated by Internet geeks and some of the digerati. I think so: more and more mavens of the Internet are coming out firmly against academic knowledge in all its forms. This might sound outrageous to say, but it is sadly true. Let’s review the evidence…"
A Mountain I’m Willing to Die On. "If our goal is to be tolerant of people who are different than we are, Chase, then we really are aiming quite low. Traffic jams are to be tolerated. People are to be celebrated."
TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome. Great story about the two-to-three people who broke The Price is Right.
Debating the Value of College in America. Tangential to the piece, but I like this bit on the value of reading a lot: "When he is not taking on trends in modern thought, Professor X is shrewd about the reasons it’s hard to teach underprepared students how to write. “I have come to think,” he says, “that the two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” This makes sense. If you read a lot of sentences, then you start to think in sentences, and if you think in sentences, then you can write sentences, because you know what a sentence sounds like."
The Mystery of the Tainted Cocaine. "Levamisole is not like other common cutting agents—sugar, baking powder, laxatives, etc.—in three important ways: 1. It’s more expensive than other cuts. 2. It makes some customers sick. 3. It’s being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States. This last mystery is the most puzzling. Typically, smugglers like to move the purest possible product—less volume means less chance of detection—and cut their drugs once they cross into the United States."
The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob. “But Peggy Jo didn’t just rob a bank. Beginning with that May 1991 trip to American Federal, she robbed lots of banks. According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone, never using a partner to operate as her lookout or drive her getaway car. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman. What’s more, she was so determined not to hurt anyone that she never carried a weapon into any bank she robbed. ‘I have to admit, I admired her style,' said Steve Powell, a former FBI agent…”
Cowboys and Pit Crews. Atul Gawande’s 2011 Commencement Address to Harvard Medical School.
Sorry again for cluttering the feeds. I have been finding I’ve been doing most of my extracurricular reading these days using Instapaper on my iPod Touch, and I wanted a way to automatically post the pieces I enjoy here. Not sure if this was the best way to go about it, but since Instapaper supports Pinboard integration, I signed up for an account there, and can now suck my Pinboard RSS feed right into my weblog.
(I know I could have pulled in the Instapaper “liked” feed, but the app doesn’t allow me to monkey with titles and excerpts before posting the way it does when posting to Pinboard.)
Prison Without Walls. "Compared with incarceration, the cost of such surveillance is minuscule—mere dollars per day—and monitoring has few of the hardening effects of time behind bars. Nor do all the innovations being developed depend on technology. Similar efforts to control criminals in the wild are under way in pilot programs that demand adherence to onerous parole guidelines, such as frequent, random drug testing, and that provide for immediate punishment if the parolees fail. The result is the same: convicts who might once have been in prison now walk among us unrecognized—like pod people, or Canadians."
The Dying of the Light. Roger Ebert continues to build a compelling case against 3D movies.
