Links, asides, and everything that does not belong in a more specific mini-blog.
The best analysis I've read so far of Beam's announcement that they'll be diluting Makers Mark due to increasing demand. Makers is currently 90 proof, which is, like, the bare minimum alcohol content a bourbon needs to be taken halfway…
Dan Benjamin responds to his pal John Gruber's decision to move The Talk Show to Mule Radio Syndicate, away from Dan's 5by5 network (and, obviously, away from Dan). I don't really have a dog in this fight, unlike some other people who…
The NYT's Kevin Roose lives like the 1% for a day, and reports back: I’m outfitted for the day in a navy pinstripe suit, picked out by Clifton C. Berry, who outfits Wall Street workers with his own line of bespoke menswear. It’s probably…
Or: "Multi-tasking: Threat, or Menace?" Tony Schwartz writes: What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our…
Matt Bai tells the long, sad story of last summer's initially promising but ultimately failed debt negotiations between John Boehner and the White House. In short, it seems the main reason Obama administration should have been less eager…
David Weisman in Seed, on a surprising overlap between what Buddhism teaches and science observes: Despite my doubts, neurology and neuroscience do not appear to profoundly contradict Buddhist thought. Neuroscience tells us the thing we…
Funny that this Ideas of March thing should happen today, or rather, that yesterday I posted the exact thing I'd have wanted to say today if I'd known we were going to spend today talking about why blogging matters. But, to expand on some…
A photographic recap of the late North Korean dictator's life. Related: The creator of the Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things Tumblr blog says he plans to keep going even after his subject's death.
Rick Ungar, for Forbes: [The medical loss ratio, a provision of Obama's Affordable Care Act,] requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect on actual medical care rather than overhead,…
Zug is a Swiss canton where low taxes have brought high employment and lots of wealth. It also has real estate prices and cost of living so high that none of its workers can afford to live there: "If you make 300,000 or 400,000 francs,…
An excellent NYT op-ed by Drew Westen, explaining in narrative/informational terms how Obama has failed to sell, or even adequately explain, his policies to the American public. Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what…
Paul Krugman: We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that…
Anna Lewis on the Fog Creek blog about women returning to computer science, and why they've stayed away until now: One of the things that happens is that women don’t even think they’re qualified for something because it’s advertised in…
Happy Cog's Joe Rinaldi on the obsession with "cool": Cool just happens; it shouldn’t be the target a project tries to hit. I don’t think great work and being cool are mutually exclusive. I think a lot of creative agencies are cool. But…
The New York Times investigates the strange new phenomenon that is the adult prom. The adult version featured much of the same awkwardness as the high school prom, made only more tolerable with the addition of alcohol. Inside a ballroom,…
Piling on stupid-sounding ideas, crazy valuations, and VCs in general is a popular spectator sport in tech circles, but—call me naïve—when I heard Color got $41 million in funding for that app, I just assumed there was a good reason, like…
In case you were wondering why anyone ever thought Detroit was a compelling target for al-Qaeda: When an admitted al-Qaida operative planned his itinerary for a Christmas 2009 airline bombing, he considered launching the strike in the…
Slate's Jack Shafer reports on how NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger sees readers who try to get around the paper's pay fence and read for free: Can people go around the system? The answer is yes, just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right…
And here's an infographic showing the annual prices of various online subscriptions side-by-side, made to demonstrate one simple point: the New York Times's $455/year all-access pricing is totally insane. MobileMe, Hulu Plus, and Rdio all…
Leave it to John Gruber to express everything I wanted to say in a post I didn't get around to finishing about the NYT's "pay fence" plan, only smarter and in more depth. I'd add only my worry that because this pricing scheme is so…
If you were wondering "will the stats wizards at OkCupid still write awesome blog posts full of observations based on analysis of their user data now that they've been acquired by Match.com?", it turns out the answer is a definite yes.…
Jonah Lehrer writes for Wired about a statistician who noticed a pattern in the visible numbers printed on scratch-off lotto tickets, and from that was able to figure out how to tell if a ticket was a winner without scratching off a…
Oh brother: "There may be some people here today who do not have living within them the Holy Spirit," Bentley said. ''But if you have been adopted in God's family like I have, and like you have if you're a Christian and if you're saved,…
As part of Deadline.com's award season coverage, they interviewed Sorkin about the film and posted a PDF of the complete screenplay. Reading the amazing opening scene—where Zuckerberg's girlfriend breaks up with him—the most notable thing…
This is pretty cool: the NYT have released a new feature that lets you share links not only to individual stories/pages, but also to specific paragraphs or sentences within those stories. To use the feature you just double-press the shift…
Shi Jianfeng was convicted of not paying more than $550,000 in road fees over a period of just eight months. And in addition to his life sentence, he (or, I guess, his family) are also being fined $300,000. The Chinese public and media…
A photo essay featuring some of Detroit's most decaying buildings. Hard to imagine these buildings were full of life just a few decades ago.
Larry David gets to keep his Bush tax cuts, and with all the money he's saving he's gonna start buying real granola: The only problem is if, God forbid, the tax cuts are repealed in two years, how will I ever go back to Special K and…
Includes such popular favorites as Hungover Owls, Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber, Unhappy Hipsters and, of course, Michael Bublé Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.
Planet Money translates the Federal Reserve Board's latest policy statement from Fed-speak to English. For example, when the Fed says this: Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price…
Not at all surprising. I enjoyed watching the show while it was on, and it had a few well-written episodes. But neither the characters nor the season-long mystery ever really came together enough for me to be excited for season two.…
Vanity Fair excerpts Bill Carter's upcoming tell-all book about the nasty battle earlier this year between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, which put Leno back in charge of The Tonight Show only six months after he finally handed it over to…
That's what you get for creating one of the most important television series ever made.
Nikon's finally announced their new "enthusiast"/prosumer DSLR model (and successor to my beloved D90), the D7000. Features include a 16 megapixel sensor, 1080p HD video, two SD card slots and 39 point autofocus. It goes on sale next…
New York Magazine interviews Ira Glass: Times, Post, or Daily News? Times. Please. I'm a cliché. Did I mention I work in public broadcasting?
Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released their "Mindset List", a list of some of the cultural touchstones for the new incoming class, so their faculty can better understand their students and know to avoid dated references.…
On how it feels, and affects one's thought process, to be granted above-top-secret security clearance: First, you'll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you.…
Beautifully designed essay, with charts, graphs and photographs, on the process of using Kickstarter to finance a new printing of Mod's book Art Space Tokyo. Short version: A++, would crowd-finance again.
The facts are these: right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart published video of Shirley Sherrod, a senior official at the Dept. of Agriculture, boasting over having once discriminated against a white farmer. There was a blogstorm, and the…
The WaPo investigates the impossibly large national security infrastructure built up after 9/11, a monster that employs over a million people (including over 850,000 with top-secret security clearance) and is so disorganized it is…
McSweeney's puts the SEO to some literary classics, thus answering the burning question: what if Faulkner had been writing for Jason Calacanis?
Selected portraits taken during the MoMA's exhibit of performance artist "Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present", posted to MoMA's Flickr stream. The artwork, in a nutshell, consists of Abramović sitting at a table in silence, where…
There's a lot golden in this interview with Pixar president Ed Catmull, but the thing I want to highlight is this bit on the idea of honesty as "an abstraction easy to ignore" in the creative/collaborative process: They don’t want to walk…
Derek Sivers on how consideration and civility go completely out the window when strangers talk to each other over the internet: Last week, one of her clients sent her a 10-page-long scathing email, chopping her down, calling her a scam…
Newly updated: a list of financial crisis literature, ranked by the number of F-bombs. Interestingly the F-bombiest two — Michael Lewis's The Big Short and Andrew Ross Sorkin's Too Big to Fail — are also really the best two.
I’m almost — almost — ashamed to admit I thought Swatch’s gonzo new time system was an awesome idea back in the day: Swatch Internet Time (or beat time) was a decimal time concept introduced in 1998 and marketed by the Swatch corporation…
This story has made the rounds as an example of how Randy Michaels is crazy. And yeah, I'll grant that distributing weasel-word 'bingo' cards and asking Tribune employees to rat each other out just because of the CEO thinks making his…
Breaking news: Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in…
And before you go assuming this came out of their little video embedding disagreement with the label: A word on Capitol/EMI: Neither our lawyers nor their lawyers have any hard feelings and, in fact, the split has been remarkably…
Theresa Nielsen Hayden, on attempts by obscure authors to sue Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling for plagiarism: What these lawsuits teach us: The plaintiffs haven’t paid much attention to other works in the genre. Non-writers think it’s…
So there's this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect: A cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”. The unskilled…
In a proposed change for the upcoming DSM-V, Asperger syndrome would be eliminated as its own, separate diagnosis, and merged in with several other conditions under a general ‘autism spectrum diseases’ category. The “Aspies” are not…
Or, more accurately, “Beetle-Man.” Wired’s Danger Room blog reports Darpa—the gonzo R&D wing of the U.S. military that gave us the Internet—is funding a team at Cornell who are working on gadgets that may one day allow a person to climb…
I know what you're thinking: "we were still training soldiers to use bayonets?" Apparently so. And apparently, they've even been used this decade: A group of 20 British soldiers near Basra fought off an ambush by over 100 Mahdi fighters…
Can we seriously say we want him to be responsible about fixing out $8 trillion deficit, then complain that we're not gonna have a Hilton on the moon? No. No we can't.
The producer of the BBC2 documentary series "How Earth Made Us" visited Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales, a place he describes as "the deadliest place on earth": It's 50oC and has a humidity of 100%, less than a hundred people have been…
It's worth remembering that we didn't end up with a crippled health care bill because Democrats just felt like giving a gift to the insurance industry. It's also because Republicans told them they'd vote for the bill if it got turned into…