Link Banana

It’s pieces like this that make me love David Brooks. Telling us what we don’t want to hear, but need to. The jumping off point:

Despite the Democratic triumph that month, [Galston and Kamarck] noted, public distrust of government remains intensely high. Historically, it has been nearly impossible to pass major domestic reforms in the face of that kind of distrust. Therefore, they counseled, the new administration should move cautiously to rebuild trust before beginning a transformational agenda.

The Economist makes (or made in November) an interesting point: it’s the middle of the road stuff, not the blockbusters, that are suffering a technology marches forward.

A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.

(via Marco, who pulled the quote that most likely explains the phenomona)

Though there’s nothing obviously new in this piece by Bruce Schneier on CNN, it’s nice to see the argument against the recent hype so clearly articulated. I thought this was a point too seldom made:

Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

(via DF)

This is unquestionably the best blog I’ve run across this month, and it’s certainly in the running for best new-to-me blog of 2009. A sampling of the near-daily statistics you can learn:

• More Coca-Cola products are consumed per person in Mexico than any other country, and the company has 70% of the nation’s soft drinks market. #
• 98% of Indians have never flown. #
• More than 12,000 laptops are reported missing every week at US airports. #
• America is home to more Wal-mart employees (1.3m) than high-school teachers. #

(via @fakelvis)

Excused by nostalgia for the decade’s passing, but really here because of Jeff Atwood and my not seeing it the first time. His unquestionable best:

As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.

In a delightful and wide-ranging essay John McWhorter makes some good points about the underappreciated upside of the dwindling number of spoken languages.

Can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?

(via IotD)

I’ve been saving this Slate piece, which you probably saw the first time, for over a month. I finally read it and it just about met my hopes for it.

“After it was finished? I hated it! I couldn’t stand to listen to it. I thought it was the worst piece of garbage I’d ever heard.”

It’s something of a bold claim, but there’s a fair amount to like in this profile of Jerry Morris, the first man to show that heart health and physical activity went hand-in-hand. This idea, though I imagine somewhat overstated, left me spinning:

His paper (“Coronary heart-disease and physical activity of work”) finally appeared in The Lancet in 1953. His hypothesis, as he still called it, was greeted with general disbelief. What could exercise possibly have to do with heart attacks? True, there had always been a vague belief that exercise was good for the soul. Mens sana in corpore sano (“a healthy mind in a healthy body”), the Roman poet Juvenal had written nearly two millennia before Morris, possibly with satirical intent, and the Victorians fetishised team spirit and muddy playing fields. But before Morris, nobody knew that exercise stopped people dying.

(via @longreads)

While tidying up, I found this draft post from June of 2008. It was still interesting to me, and the link still works, so here it is:

I found Andrew Solomon’s piece on the various stripes of autism activists fascinating, and this idea intriguing:

These activists argue that autism is not an illness but an alternative way of being. The preferred terminology among disability activists is to speak of a “person with deafness” rather than a “deaf person,” or a “person with dwarfism” rather than a dwarf. But Sinclair has said that “person-first” terminology denies the centrality of autism and has compared “person with autism” to describing a man as a “person with maleness.”

More than the non-trivial history lesson that this article teaches, I love the way it clarifies and illuminates the vast amounts of the natural world that were a mystery in pre-Copernican Europe. The sense of progress, wonder, and possibility I got from it gave me a brain-boner.

And because the article made me deeply curious about it, the best version of the Waldseemüller map is on Wikipedia. If, like mine, your browser chokes on their massive full-size version, the one appended to this review will probably sate your curiosity.

Either this piece about the competing theories of Neanderthal extinction is really interesting, or I was wrong to think I was bored by all history before 1000BC(E). In either case, recommended.

(via GMSTR)

I saw at least five links to this Onion story before I read a word of it. And when I finally did, I understood why it had at least five links. It dares to imagine a different, probably better, world:

“We know it’s good, and everyone’s pretty happy with the overall taste, so why spend all our time worrying about what other people think?” PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi told reporters during a press conference at the company’s corporate headquarters. “Frankly, it just feels sort of weird and desperate to put all this energy into telling people what to drink. If they don’t like it, then they don’t like it.”

… Nooyi told reporters the company’s $1.3 billion annual advertising budget would be put into Pepsi’s savings account, spread among various charitable organizations, and divvied up into generous bonuses for the company’s minimum-wage factory employees.

(J-Walk’s the one that finally made me pay attention)

I’ve been (rather passively) looking for a book like this for the last few years. And here I have found it as a simple, unassuming webpage. There are some (to me) strange transliterations — kamma and Nibbana for karma and nirvana — but it’s an admirable introduction for anyone striving to be a good Buddhist or just curious about what that would entail.

A sample of its wisdom:

The best remedy for a lapse or transgression already committed is to decide never to repeat it; the best remedy for neglecting to do good is to do it without delay.

(via Dan Benjamin, I think)

I thought about picking out a favorite from Lloyd’s post about recent life advice pieces, but every link is well chosen and worth perusing, You’re unlikely to regret the time.

Stuart McMillen, who does an interesting combination of commentary and cartooning, points out all the ways that in a post-communist world it is Aldous Huxley, not George Orwell, whose dystopia seems more prescient. He was inspired by a book I’ve tried to read more than once.

While digging around, I noticed a comment that was far to good to pass up:

So instead of reading Amusing Ourselves to Death, you can fit this simplified form of the introduction in-between television commercials.

(via K)

Marco said it better than I would:

I could quote some great part of this like I usually do, but if you just skim part of it and breeze by, you’ll miss the entire purpose of this article.

Rarely does someone’s blog post really make me take a step back from all of this and think for a bit. This did.

Perhaps the oddest part of the story of the capture of Radovan Karadzic was that the accused war criminal was involved in new age medicine. While exploring the life of Dragan Dabic, Jack Hitt offers this tidbit about that seeming dissonance:

To American ears, the story of the war criminal hiding out among the new-age healers sounds like a classic when-worlds-collide narrative. But in Serbia, things are more complicated. […] In Serbia, then, the politics of alternative medicine became a haven for right-wing anti-Communists — an expression of ancient Balkan heritage. In the war against the Bosnian Muslims, Karadzic and his fellow Serb nationalists co-opted the one-string folk instrument known as the gusle and turned it into a cultural symbol of national pride. Most of the alternative healers I met either had a gusle on their wall or a pin of one on their lapel.

From the school of “If you love something, don’t let go”, an encouraging story of a midlife non-divorce. Also interesting: the number of people who think it was an insulting, passive-aggressive, or vain story to tell.

(via kottke and mefi)

Andrew Rice tells a fascinating story about the dimly understood Rawandan genocide, NBC’s effort to make a “To Catch a Predator” for international war criminals, and a refugee French teacher.

(via @longreads)

Tom Vanderbilt has penned a good piece about how great a well-designed roundabout is. Americans’ gut-level aversion is baffling to me, especially now that my commute features a few.