Odds & Ends

Nov. 16, 2010

Eddie Coyle comes to the stage, almost

A stage production of George V. Higgins’ definitive Boston crime novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” makes its way to opening night.

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Sep. 11, 2010

Oliver Sacks on Mythmaking

Is the human instinct to tell stories — and it does seem to be instinctive since it crosses all boundaries of time and place — a way we explain the world to ourselves? I would say that the human brain or the human mind is disposed to create stories or narratives. Children love stories, make [...]

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Aug. 16, 2010

Hanging Up

This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It [...]

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May. 5, 2010

New Money

Designer Michael Tyznik’s concept for a redesign of American currency (rejected, of course).

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Apr. 13, 2010

The Burry Principle

“Once you become an idea’s defender, you have a harder time changing your mind about it.” — Michael Lewis, The Big Short, paraphrasing investor Michael Burry (slightly paraphrased again by me)

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Mar. 14, 2010

The issue is inequality, not total wealth

On almost every index of quality of life, or wellness, or deprivation, there is a gradient showing a strong correlation between a country’s level of economic inequality and its social outcomes. … This has nothing to do with total wealth or even the average per-capita income. America is one of the world’s richest nations, with [...]

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Mar. 2, 2010

Explaining Insomnia

Jonah Lehrer on why we can’t sleep, an affliction that has me thrashing around every night: Because insomnia is triggered, at least in part, by anxiety about insomnia, the worst thing we can do is think about not being able to sleep; the diagnosis exacerbates the disease. And that’s why this frustrating condition will never [...]

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Feb. 25, 2010

Bill Gates on Energy

Is there a more demoralizing problem than global warming? Discussing it feels utterly hopeless. Climate skeptics are unmoveable despite the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence. Intelligent, well-meaning conservative friends of mine, people I like and respect, simply reject that the problem exists, let alone that we ought to fix it. So I found this video [...]

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Feb. 19, 2010

The Tweeted Wisdom of Alain de Botton

Selections from the Twitter feed of Alain de Botton, a master of the tweet. The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives. We can only envy people towards whom we feel equal: it would not occur to anyone to envy the queen for her house. [...]

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Jan. 4, 2010

Rest and Re-creation

Reading Little Dorrit the other day, I came across a sentence describing Mr. Pancks as a man who rarely “appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate himself by going anywhere or saying anything without a pervading object” (ch. XXV). This obsolete sense of recreate, meaning to refresh or energize, obviously shares a common [...]

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