May 2013
2 posts
John: There's a lot of reason to invade Turkey. Then you would gain control of the Dardanelles, and access to the Black Sea!
Merlin: And that's the guy from the Mountain Goats, right?
April 2013
11 posts
“I don’t want to read the letters to the Corinthians. I don’t want to read the...”
– RotL Ep 70: “Bad Cop, Worse Cop, Man In Bathrobe” (via roderickin)
In Case Of Actual Death: myloveinthug: this study... →
myloveinthug:
this study on identifying communities on (english-speaking) twitter by word usage is a little dry, but the supplementary data with word lists used by each group is pretty amazing.
the highlights for me were the following groups (note, these are my identifications of the…
March 2013
29 posts
Musical Chairs (Choosing the Right Seat) →
Alex Cornell:
One of the most complex social situations you will encounter is the 45 seconds that elapse while deciding where to sit for dinner at a restaurant. Your choice should appear natural, unbiased and haphazard if executed properly. Timing is everything. These 45 seconds determine how enjoyable your next 2 hours will be.
The Shooter →
Phil Bronstein:
The group discussed what would happen if they were surrounded by Pakistani troops. We would surrender. The original plan was to have Vice-President Biden fly to Islamabad and negotiate our release with Pakistan’s president.
This is hearsay, but I understand Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military? That was...
Behind the Scenes: Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Breast... →
Kevin Fanning:
Cynthia Pekoria (manager, State Farm Insurance, Sherman Oaks branch): OK which one of you dick-fucks approved this.
Dalton Leonard (customer service representative): If this is about Kanye’s cat getting renter’s insurance, I can actually explain that.
Pekoria: It’s not about Kanye’s cat.
Why Times Square Needs a McWorld →
Jeb Boniakowski:
[L]et me bring you to the second floor, the grand pavilion. This is a complete McDonald’s with a twist: every month or quarter or so, it is redesigned to provide the exact experience of dining in a different country’s McDonald’s. Did you know in some places, like including Paris and New York, McDonald’s has experimented with table service?...
Amazon, Apple, and the beauty of low margins →
Eugene Wei:
So much of Amazon’s competitive advantage in those days came from operational efficiency. You can choose to leverage that strength in two ways. One is you match your competitor on pricing and just earn higher margins. But the other, the way Amazon has always tended to favor, is to lower prices, to thin the oxygen for your competitors.
If you have bigger lungs than your...
“I’ve always had an urge to try to hold on to places and documents and buildings....”
– Nicholson Baker
How Aleksandr Knew What He Knew, and How I Knew... →
Ellie Kemper:
“Only whores smoke cigarettes in cabs,” you said tightly.
You wanted to hurt me, and it worked.
I could feel the tears well up in my eyes, but I would not permit them to fall. That is a trick I taught myself a long time ago, along with forming my tongue in the shape of a W. “Well, what does that make me?” I asked, spitting on my own thigh and extinguishing the still-lit cigarette...
The Parable of Prohibition →
Johann Hari:
With the implementation of the 18th Amendment in 1920, the dysfunctions of Prohibition began. When you ban a popular drug that millions of people want, it doesn’t disappear. Instead, it is transferred from the legal economy into the hands of armed criminal gangs. Across America, gangsters rejoiced that they had just been handed one of the biggest markets in the country, and...
The Real Cuban Missile Crisis →
Benjamin Schwarz:
Remarkably, given the alarmed and confrontational posture that Washington adopted during the missile crisis, the tapes of the ExComm deliberations, which Stern has minutely assessed, reveal that Kennedy and his advisers understood the nuclear situation in much the same way Khrushchev did. On the first day of the crisis, October 16, when pondering Khrushchev’s motives for...
Close to the Machine →
Ellen Ullman:
Procedure calls. Relational database normalization. Objects going in and out of scope. Though my mind is racing, I feel calm. It’s the spacey calm of satellites speeding over the earth at a thousand miles per second: relative to each other, we float. The images of patients with AIDS recede, the beleaguered service providers are forgotten, the whole grim reality of the epidemic...
Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan... →
Stephen Rodrick:
At their second meeting, Lohan complained to Schrader about a biopic she was shooting for Lifetime, in which she played Elizabeth Taylor, one of her role models. She proclaimed the director a jerk, her co-star a nightmare and the crew unfriendly. On it went. Schrader listened for a while. He looked stricken. He softly tapped his balding head on the table. Lohan asked him what...
The Lion Smokes Tonight →
Drew Magary:
Doctor Dina leads us into the greenhouse where the grown-up plants live; the stalks of cannabis in here are so tall that the floor is sunken to accommodate them. You can see the buds flowering right beside your head, millions of tiny nodules sprouting on top of one another like the rippling muscles of a comic-book character.
Snoop and Doctor Dina have collaborated to grow a...
The Myth of Universal Love →
Stephen T. Asma:
Cultivating loyalty is no small thing. George Orwell, for example, considered preferential loyalty to be the “essence of being human.” Critiquing Gandhi’s recommendation — that we must have no close friendships or exclusive loves because these will introduce loyalty and favoritism, preventing us from loving everyone equally — Orwell retorted that “the essence of being human is...
Germs Are Us →
Michael Specter:
This week, Martin Blaser will address a plenary session of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, an organization that he once led. The title of his talk, “The Menace of Antibiotics”, would have generated guffaws and outrage twenty years ago. Even today, it is easy to misconstrue his message. “We are an endlessly variable stew of essential microbes,”...
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead →
Kevin Drum:
Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the...
Interplanetary Cessna →
Randall Munroe:
Unfortunately, X-Plane is not capable of simulating the hellish environment near the surface of Venus. But physics calculations give us an idea of what flight there would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
February 2013
17 posts
Napster, Udacity, and the Academy →
Clay Shirky:
Harvard, where I was fortunate enough to have a visiting lectureship a couple of years ago, is our agreed-upon Best Institution, and it is indeed an extraordinary place. But this very transcendence should make us suspicious. Harvard’s endowment, 31 billion dollars, is over three hundred times the median, and only one college in five has an endowment in the first place. Harvard also...
Joy Ride →
Jeanne Marie Laskas:
Michael didn’t know she was a trucker when they met, not that it would have mattered. He heard her laugh at a comedy club. It was the laughter that drew him. He got her phone number. She thought, hey, a free meal if he shows up, and was shocked when he did. “I eat chicken, corn, and mashed potatoes,” she told him. “That’s it.” She told him...
