Income by Percentile January 14, 2011

A breakdown of household income by percentile in the US. It’s all in this really cool table.

Real Returns for the Stock Market January 14, 2011

Green is > 7%, and deep red is <0%.  The second set of squares is a 20-year window.  The form of display may be more useful than the actual implementation.

Credit: NYT

Linked January 13, 2011

1. Amy Chua  parts III-V. She does the standard qualifications-dance, the NYT magazine puts it in context,  and the author of American Born Chinese makes it a cartoon.

2. An IBM computer beats Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!.

3. A look at the prison life of the Mrs. Freshley’s Grand Honey Bun.

4. An article about the EU that somehow avoids the boring. A believable picture of German politics.

Linked January 12, 2011

1. Once upon a time, before the cult of the individualist authors, people pretended their work was written by some luminary, so it would be given authority. One example of this is Ecclesiastes, which was supposedly written by Solomon. There’s a story in this vein in today’s NYT- about a man who tries to pass off his forgeries to art galleries. He doesn’t make any money out of this, but there is probably some satisfaction in joining the canon.

2. A long McKinsey report about recruiting top students to the teaching profession. It may be worth it to look at the pictures.

3. I feel like a hipster infiltration is loosening the Economist‘s editorial policies.

Amy Chua, Part II January 11, 2011

The WSJ reviews her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

End of Overfishing? January 11, 2011

The Boston Herald claims that the US is not projected to exceed its quotas for the current fishing year, which ends on April 30, for the first time in the recorded history of American angling. Who buys it?

Common Misperceptions about Publishing January 10, 2011

Charlie Stross, sci-fi author, has put together one of the best explanations of publishing I’ve seen. He answers all sorts of questions, among them “how big will my advance be?” and “why are books the length they are?”

His series comes in nine parts-

1. The structure of the publishing industry

2. How books are made

3. What authors sell to publishers

4. Translations and foreign rights

5. Why books are the length they are

6. “Why did you pick such an awful cover for your new book?”

7. How much do SF/F authors make, and how do they break into the business?

8. Lifestyle or Job?

9. ebooks

Credit: The Browser

Angry Attorneys January 9, 2011

Law school grads dish about being led on by law schools and their debt-related frustrations in this long article from the New York Times.

How to be a Chinese mom January 8, 2011

Amy Chua lays it on a little thick in the WSJ. I went to one of her talks at the law school- she was presenting her book Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance–and Why They Fall, and helpfully admitted that the title was not the most modest thing she could have picked. After the talk nobody wanted to ask her a question, and Harold Koh, who had introduced her, obliged her with something long.

Linked January 6, 2011

1. The decline of serial killers, as reported by Slate. There were only about a third as many serial killers in the 00s as there were in the 80s.

2. The decline of American crime in Time.

The human dimension of this turnaround is extraordinary: had the rate remained unchanged, an additional 170,000 Americans would have been murdered in the years since 1992. That’s more U.S. lives than were lost in combat in World War I, Korea, Vietnam and Iraq — combined. In a single year, 2008, lower crime rates meant 40,000 fewer rapes, 380,000 fewer robberies, half a million fewer aggravated assaults and 1.6 million fewer burglaries than we would have seen if rates had remained at peak levels.

3. Rhyming Road Signs in India that one Economist reporter saw on her way to the airport.

4. A look at the life of Chinese expats in Britain and Western expats in China. Guess who adapts better?

Credits: The Browser