News That Stays News

Jon Huntsman’s REO Speedwagon Days April 4, 2011

1. In Politico: some oppo on  Huntsman, with a focus on the days in which he jammed with a local band and dropped out of high school.

2. Onion headline: Even Newt Gingrich A Little Depressed By Prospect Of Him Running For President

3. Congo’s dreary and appalling civil war, made clear in a book review in the Times.

4. A reprinted Harper’s piece on America as a nation of frustrated altruists. Analysis of the Right c. 2007 by an anthropologist.

Credits: The Browser, Longform.org

Upgrading Ramen April 3, 2011

1. Great post by Kenji Alt over at SeriousEats on how to turn humble instant noodles into more exalted dishes (i.e., Mac & Cheese).

2. In the Atlantic: changing demographics mean that Barack Obama may be able to win election in 2012 even if he only wins 40% of the white vote.

3. Measures of peak performance, like the SAT or the 40-yard-dash, seem to have a poor correlation with future success.

4. Lexington on Obama’s Libya gambit. Remarkably level-headed.

5. It’s hard to keep track of what exactly is happening in Japan now. Here’s an overview of their current nuclear situation.

Credits: Julia, the Browser

Shooting an Elephant April 1, 2011

1. George Orwell’s classic 1936 essay, an account from his days as a colonial police officer in Burma.

2. More than 90% of the cells in your body are actually foreign microbes that have made an ecosystem out of you. Carl Zimmer explains human ecology over at his blog, the Loom.

//Random piece of self-promotion- I once reviewed Zimmer’s book Soul Made Flesh for the Yale Scientific, a review that, sadly, only survives on the internet on my dad’s blog about college admissions.

3. An appreciation over at the WSJ of Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film, Paths of Glory. Link contains spoilers.

Credits: The Browser, Longform.org

What’s the matter with Kansas? March 31, 2011

1. In Slate Bill James has an article about why we don’t develop young writers as well as we develop young pitchers. He begins by considering a demographic point I’ve always been curious about:

The population of Topeka, Kan., today is roughly the same as the population of London in the time of Shakespeare, and the population of Kansas now is not that much lower than the population of England at that time. London at the time of Shakespeare had not only Shakespeare—whoever he was—but also Christopher Mar­lowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and various other men of letters who are still read today. I doubt that Topeka today has quite the same collection of distinguished writers.

From Emerson’s Self-Reliance: “to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

2. The language of the King James Bible, from the obituaries editor of the Economist in More Intelligent Life.

3. The city of Chongqing (municipal population: 31.4 million) in Western China appears to be ruled by an outspoken & charismatic reformer, Bo Xilai, and a gangster, Weng Zhenjie. Could theirs be a mutualistic relationship?

4. Emails from the men in the cockpit at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.

5. Paul Allen has some grievances with Bill Gates left over from his time at Microsoft. An excerpt of his book popped up in Vanity Fair– it provides a pretty curious look at Microsoft’s early days.

Finally, a photo:

Microsoft in the early days. Paul Allen is at the bottom right. I’m not sure who Bill Gates is, but I suspect bottom left. Via the WSJ.

Credits: The Browser

Linked March 28, 2011

1) America the Lawsuit

2) Paraprosdokian

2) List of Common Misconceptions, via wikipedia

4) How to start a soccer team on an island

The Garden of Eden Creation Kit (GECK) March 26, 2011

Looking at a painting of Adam and Eve holding an apple in an art gallery, an Englishman said: “They are English, because the man shares delicious food with a woman.”

A Frenchman said: “They are French, because they are walking in the nude.”

A North Korean said: “They are North Korean. They have no clothes and little food, but they think they are in heaven.”

The Plainspoken Economist March 25, 2011

One often thinks of this as the Economist’s view of the world, but rarely finds it stated outright:

But letting a committee run a war is a risk too. A safer, if less principled, path to re-election would be for him to topple the colonel quickly, with less scruple for the sensitivity of allies and the letter of the law. Assuming that is possible, of course.

I suppose it takes some courage to accept outright that the recommended course of action is “less principled.”

The Limits of Limited War March 23, 2011

Stephen Budiansky over at the Liberal Curmudgeon has a great post on the mismatch between the means and the ends of the Libyan campaign.

Credits: Julia

N.B. I will be off in the Ozarks this week, trying my best to catch a Crappie or two- as a result, posts will be scarce. Suggestions are, as always, most welcome- you can send them to me at jason@newsthatstaysnews.com .

The Future of Marginalia March 20, 2011

1. I am personally quite fond of drawing lines and checks and lol in the margins of my books-and I’ve avoided buying a Kindle  because you can’t scratch in it. Now we have an article in the Atlantic about what will happen to marginalia once ebooks predominate, and a great essay in the NYT by Sam Anderson, an inveterate scrawler- he described his year of reading (in photos of his marginal notes) over at The Millions.  One potential feature:

Imagine reading, say, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and touching a virtual button so that — ping! — Ernest Hemingway’s marginalia instantly appears, or Ralph Ellison’s, or Mary McCarthy’s. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of “Paradise Lost” and suddenly — zwang! — up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you. (If someone’s handwriting gave you trouble, you’d be able to toggle between script and print.) You could even “subscribe” to your favorite critic’s marginalia — get, say, one thoroughly marked-up digital book every month. Or, if you preferred to keep it contemporary, you could just read along with your friends in an endless virtual book club — their notes and your notes would show up on one another’s e-readers the moment they were made.

2. Future movie plot alert: cars can be hacked at a distance and while in operation.

Credits: The Browser

How Big Could It Be? March 18, 2011

1. The San Andreas fault is only capable of a 8.3, according to Babbage, a blog at the Economist. The Cascadia fault, on the other hand, may be overdue for a quake as powerful as the one that just struck Japan.

2. A VC who passed up the chance to invest in the company that became AdSense tells us ten things about Google. Here’s one of them:

Larry Page’s brother, Carl, helped start eGroups, a dot-com company in the 90s that was acquired for almost half a billion dollars in 2000 by Yahoo. So even if this Google thing hadn’t worked out for Larry, he probably could’ve done alright being part of his brother’s entourage.

3. In the 1984 movie Red Dawn, teenagers (Patrick Swayze & Charlie Sheen, et. al.) take on Soviet paratroopers after they drop into Colorado. MGM was gearing up to do a remake, with the Chinese in place of the Soviets, until they chickened out and replaced the Chinamen with North Koreans.

Credits: The Browser, China Real Time Report