Pour yourself some French Roast coffee, settle into your favorite chair for our longer form weekend reads:
• Why Don’t People Manage Debt Better? (Scientific American)
• The Death Of Expertise (The Federalist)
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• Behavioral Biases: What Is the Weakest Link in the Investment Profession? (CFA Institute)
• Twitter’s missing manual (Fuzzy Notepad)
• Meet the Robin Hood (or Pirate Bay) of Science (Big Think)
• The Koch Brothers’ New Brand (NY Review of Books) see also Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right (Washington Post)
• Adele: The full story (BBC)
• The Making Of “Homer At The Bat,” The Episode That Conquered Prime Time 20 Years Ago Tonight (Deadspin)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Emanuel Derman, former head of the Goldman Sachs Quantitative Strategies Group, now Director of Columbia University Master’s program in financial engineering.
• Built Up by Oil Boom, North Dakota Now Has an Emptier Feeling (NYT)
• Hank Paulson Launched The Big Lie Campaign On September 15, 2008 (Fiderer)
• The Woman Who Made Science Beautiful: Where others sought separation, Maria Sibylla Merian saw connection. (The Atlantic)
• Skip the Upkeep and Rent the Jet, or Island, Instead (NYT)
• The Departed (CIO)
• How did Albert Einstein become the poster boy for genius? (Aeon)
• Inside the NFL’s wild return to LA (ESPN)
• Pee-wee’s Big Comeback (NYT)
• The Trouble With Superman: For decades the Man of Steel has failed to find his groove, thanks to a continual misunderstanding of his strengths. (The Atlantic)
• How People Learn to Become Resilient (New Yorker)
• The Innovators: The UK is at an exciting intersection, where new business ideas meet new technological possibilities. Bloomberg Business Innovators 2016 assembles the people changing how the UK lives, works and thinks. (Bloomberg)
• Doing more with less: the economic lesson of Peak Paper (Aeon)
• The Whale That Nearly Drowned The Donald: How Trump schemed to win back millions from a high-rolling—and doomed—Japanese gambler. (Politico)
• Justin Bieber Would Like to Reintroduce Himself (GQ)
• The Wow Factor: Few could have guessed that the league’s return would become so bloody, bitter and, most of all, emblematic of how power in the NFL truly works. (ESPN)
• People Keep Talking About ‘The Establishment.’ What Is It, Anyway? (NPR)
• What was Volkswagen thinking? On the origins of corporate evil — and idiocy. (The Atlantic)
• Pretty Vacant: A New Collection Examines a Decade of NY Times War Photography (Book Forum)
• How Ex-Communists Shaped American Conservatism (The Atlantic)
• Paris gets first meat vending machine (Telegraph)
• Horror films are far scarier than in the past. Here’s how (Aeon)
• Altered Tastes: Can the new science of neurogastronomy and one very creative chef convince us that healthy food is delicious? (New Republic)
• We Are Hopelessly Hooked (NY Review of Books)
• Is there a place for fakery in art galleries and museums? (Aeon)
• Roger Goodell’s Unstoppable Football Machine (NYT) but see The Collision Sport on Trial (NY Review of Books)
• The Rent-Seeking Is Too Damn High (FiveThirtyEight)
• CFP Board Begins The Process Of Updating Its Fiduciary Standards of Professional Conduct (Kitces)
• The Psychologists Take Power (NY Review of Books)
What are you reading?
• The Walter White of Wichita (Fusion)
• The Lives and Lies of a Professional Impostor (NYT)
• The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating (Aeon)
• Hunkering Down With The Survival Mom, Queen Of The Common-Sense Preppers (Buzzfeed)
• The Inside Story of Uber’s Radical Rebranding (Wired)
• Scammers and Spammers: Inside Online Dating’s Sex Bot Con Job (Rolling Stone)
• Inside the sneaker industry: How NBA shoe deals work (Yahoo)
• New York Is Going to Turn Off Niagara Falls. Here’s How (Wired)
• The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain—And Almost Lost His Mind (Wired)
• Super high-speed internet delivered over the air isn’t as crazy as it sounds (The Verge)
• When I Quit Cutting My Hair, I Learned How Men Treat Women On American Roads (Road and Track)
• Super high-speed internet delivered over the air isn’t as crazy as it sounds (The Verge)
• The Collision Sport on Trial (NY Review of Books)
• The Clinton System (NY Review of Books)
• Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats (NYT)
• Everything You Know About Martin Shkreli Is Wrong—or Is It? (Vanity Fair)
• Why the CDC still isn’t researching gun violence, despite the ban being lifted two years ago (Washington Post)
• The Big Sleep: Scientists Pat and Peter Shaw died in a suicide pact in October. Here, their daughters reflect on their parents’ plan – and their remarkable lives. (The Age)
• The Bubble and the Crisis: A Picture Book (Fiderer)
• Super high-speed internet delivered over the air isn’t as crazy as it sounds (The Verge)
• When I Quit Cutting My Hair, I Learned How Men Treat Women On American Roads (Road and Track)
• Super high-speed internet delivered over the air isn’t as crazy as it sounds (The Verge)
• The Collision Sport on Trial (NY Review of Books)
• The Clinton System (NY Review of Books)
• Indian Women Seeking Jobs Confront Taboos and Threats (NYT)
• Why the CDC still isn’t researching gun violence, despite the ban being lifted two years ago (Washington Post)
• ‘Trump Could Do It’: An Election Gambler Predicts Iowa (Politico)
• Inside the sneaker industry: How NBA shoe deals work (Yahoo)
• New York Is Going to Turn Off Niagara Falls. Here’s How (Wired)
• The Neurologist Who Hacked His Brain—And Almost Lost His Mind (Wired)
• The Insanely Complicated Logistics of Cage-Free Eggs for All (Wired)
• How Intellectuals Create a Public (Chronicle of Higher Education)
• AT&T Helped U.S. Spy on Internet on a Vast Scale (NYT)
• How to Survive Solitary Confinement (Nautilus)
• Is Financial Planning Software Too Product-Centric? (Kitces)
• Extravagant U.S. Estates of the Gilded Age & Roaring ’20s (Curbed)
• The Grand Strategy of Rising Superpower Management (Bradford Delong)
• Why Musicians Need Philosophy (Future Symphony Institute)
• What if You Were the World’s Best Market Timer? (Irrelevant Investor)
• The Tennis Racket: Secret Files Expose Evidence Of Match Fixing (Buzzfeed)
• Why boredom is anything but boring (Nature)
• Real Scientific Literacy (Neurologica)
• How a 90-Year-Old Missing Person Became a Hit on Spotify (Priceonomics)
• The Deep Space of Digital Reading (Nautilus)
• Does Taco Bell Hot Sauce Expire and Everything Else About Sauce Packets You Never Thought To Ask (Atlas Obscura)
• The Happiness Code: A new approach to self-improvement is taking
off in Silicon Valley: cold, hard rationality. (NYT)
• The Roberts Court finds a new way to stack the deck in favor of the rich (Washington Post)
• Big Cable Owns Internet Access. Here’s how to change that. (Medium)
• Consciousness Is Not Mysterious (The Atlantic)
• Can Hobby Lobby Buy the Bible? In just the past six years, the evangelical owners of Hobby Lobby have amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of biblical antiquities. Why? (The Atlantic)
• How William Cleveland Turned Data Visualization Into a Science (Priceonomics)
• A Politics For Technology (Stratechery)
• When Do You Become an Adult? In an age when the line between childhood and adulthood is blurrier than ever, what is it that makes people grown up? (The Atlantic)
• The Website Obesity Crisis (Idle Words)
• How a Vietnamese Refugee Is Rethinking Food Delivery in America (Bloomberg)
• How the Daily Fantasy Sports Industry Turns Fans Into Suckers (NYT)
• One Man’s 40-Year War on Salt Could Finally Succeed (Bloomberg)
• Terrorism, Migrants, and Crippling Debt: Is This the End of Europe? (Vanity Fair)
• These Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real (Nautilus)
• Mr. (Swipe) Right? (California Sunday)
• The Inventor of Auto-Tune (Priceonomics)
Even Michael Lewis Was Surprised Hollywood Bet on The Big Short (Vanity Fair)
• Why is the Pollution So Bad in Beijing? (Priceonomics)
• One year, two races: Inside the Republican Party’s bizarre, tumultuous 2015 (Washington Post)
• Body Hackers and Bioengineers Are Trying to Make DFW a Hub of Implantable Electronics (Dallas Observer)
• Gold Is The Money Of The Future: Gilder’s 21st Century Case For Gold (Forbes)
• The Importance of Being Orwell: Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell’s Social Evolution (Literary Hub)
• The Meaning of Mahler (NY Review of Books)
• High-Intensity Interval Training Offers a Short, Sweet—and Effective—Workout Routine (WSJ)
• A Good Night’s Sleep Is Tied to Interruptions, Not Just Hours (WSJ)
• Use It and Abuse It (The Baffler)
• Promoting Marriage Has Failed and Is Unnecessary to Cut Poverty (Demos)
• The Content Marketing Handbook (Priceonomics)
• The Problem With Work-Focused Poverty Initiatives (Demos)
• Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty (Demos)
• The Violent Afterlife of a Recycled Plastic Bottle: What happens after you toss it into the bin? (The Atlantic)
• 10 things to know before you eat your next chicken dinner (Reveal)
• Woman who has never felt pain experiences it for the first time (New Scientist)
• David Simon on Spotlight, His Pal Tom McCarthy, and the Death of Print Journalism (Vulture)
• Access Denied: The media, after access (The Awl)
• ‘If I burn out, I burn out’: meet Taylor Wilson, nuclear boy genius (The Guardian)
• George Lucas: To feel the true force of ‘Star Wars,’ he had to learn to let it go (Washington Post)
• The cost of happiness: Powerful interests benefit from our increased willingness to monitor and meddle with our mental states (New Humanist)
• How Republican ‘Thought Police’ Enforce Climate-Science Denial (NY Mag)
• Control the Negotiation Before It Begins (Harvard Business Review)
• America Is Too Dumb for TV News. Trump and others are proving it: we can’t handle the truth (Rolling Stone)
• How I Got My Beach Body (In Just 3 Months!) (GQ)
• The Surprising Failure of Calorie Counts on Menus (The Upshot)
• The Shadow: A hundred years of Orson Welles. (New Yorker)
• Teach Yourself Italian: For a writer, a foreign language is a new kind of adventure. (New Yorker)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with
• Why story is used to explain symphonies and sport matches alike (Aeon)
• My Dark California Dream: Our parents had wide open spaces all around. We still had nature within reach. Now what? (NYT)
• Ashima’s Most Daring Climb: 14-year old is already one of the most talented climbers in the world (ESPN)
• Modern Day Da Vinci: Horacio Pagani (Speedhunters)
• The Serial Swatter: Internet trolls have learned to exploit our over-militarized police. It’s a crime that’s hard to stop — and hard to prosecute. (NYT)
• And from the left…Fox News: There’s more to Fox News’ strategy of hiring liberals than creating a public boxing match (Columbia Journalism Review)
• We Got Scammed by Government Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan (Bill Moyers)
• How Much Does It Cost to Liberate a Country? (The Nation)
• Models of the minimum wage (for what they’re worth) (Jared Bernstein)
• Writers in the Storm: How weather went from symbol to science and back again. (New Yorker)
• Nothing Remains Unchanged but the Clouds: With his worries about the gigantic power of technology and the miniscule moral illumination it can afford, Walter Benjamin remains our contemporary. (The Nation)
• How a prized daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church came to question its beliefs. (New Yorker)
• The Invention of the Wah-Wah Pedal (Priceonomics)
• What I Wish Everyone Knew When They Talked About Abortion (Buzzfeed)
• Confessions of a For-Profit College Inspector: Young, broke, and desperate, I worked at the heart of an emerging nationwide scandal in higher education. Here’s what I saw. (Pacific Standard)
• Republicans Are Revolutionaries, Not Conservatives: A Response to Thomas Schaller (Bill Moyers)
• After the Snowden Revelations, Did We Change Our Behavior on the Internet? (Priceonomics)
• In search of the zeitgeist: A new book explores the risk-averse spirit of our times. (Spiked
• The Economics of War with China: This Will Hurt You More than It Hurts Me (War On the Rocks)
• Digging for Riches: Inside Russia’s Biggest Gold Supplier (Bloomberg)
• Bread Is Broken: Industrial production destroyed both the taste and the nutritional
value of wheat. (NYT)
• How Many People Take Credit for Writing a Hit Song? (Priceonomics)
• Steve McQueen and the Sexiest Cars and Motorcycles on Film (Bloomberg)
• A Jury of One’s Fans: A few headline-making lawsuits in the music world remind that legal filings can double as press releases. (The Atlantic)
• Vice Media Rides Lofty Expectations (WSJ)
• Benghazi Biopsy: A Comprehensive Guide to One of America’s Worst Political Outrages (Newsweek)
• Scientific paradigms rest on change not truth (Aeon)
• The Invention of Pad Thai (Priceonomics)
• The rating game: how Uber and its peers turned us into horrible bosses (The Verge)
• Inside the Design Labs Where the iPhone’s Coolest New Feature Was Built (Bloomberg)
• The Complete List of Unicorn Companies (CB Insights)
• Corporate Prosecutors and Their Invisible Chains (Harvard Law Record)
• Sam Brownback is a harbinger of national doom: Bleeding Kansas’ scary lesson for America (Salon) see also Obama tops Brownback in ruby-red Kansas (MSNBC)
• Weirder Than Paradise: How beauty combines with choice and convenience to attract leisure travellers to the US, warts and all. (FT)
• Why food allergy fakers need to stop (Boston Globe)
• Keeping an Eye Open Review (Barnes and Noble)
• What Killed America’s Climate-Saving Nuclear Renaissance? (Bloomberg)
• Meet the People Who Literally Make It Rain (Bloomberg)
• Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit? (NYT)
• How an episode of The Simpsons is made (The Verge)
• The Offshore Game of Online Sports Betting (NYT)
• Life With My Robot Secretary (FastCo Design)
• The Inside Story of Surface Book, Microsoft’s Next Big Thing (Wired)
• Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit? (NYT)
• The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black (NYT)
• This suburban Illinois family has been terrorized by hackers for the last three years (Fusion)
• How Friendships Change When You Become an Adult: “We need to catch up soon!” (The Atlantic)
• The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp (Huffington Post)
• Welles Lettres: The first and final chapters of the legendary director’s complicated career (Book Forum)
• Humanism, Science, and the Radical Expansion of the Possible (The Nation)
• Study: Food stamps do much more to fight poverty than we thought (Vox)
• How well seven presidential candidates did as governor (Washington Post)
• How Satan Came to Salem: The real story of the witch trials (The Atlantic)
• Trump-Bush feud fires up over 9/11 (Politico)
• The Lost Art of Listening: Has classical music become irrelevant? (The Monthly)
• In Defense of The New York Times (Stratechery)
• U.S. Purchase Mortgage Originations Predicted to Hit $905 Billion in 2016 (World Property Journal)
• How Could Volkswagen’s Top Engineers Not Have Known? (Bloomberg)
• Why more scientists are needed in the public square (The Conversation)
• If Everything Is So Amazing, Why’s Nobody Happy? (VQR Online)
• Cooper Union Situation Emblematic of Problems Facing U.S. Colleges (Institutional Investor)
Gladwell: Thresholds of Violence: How School Shootings Spread (New Yorker)
• The Exemplary Narcissism of Snoopy (The Atlantic)
• Her Code Got Humans on the Moon—And Invented Software Itself (Wired)
• Coal, Which Built a Chinese City, Now Threatens to Bury It (NYT)
• Inside Michael Jackson’s Iconic First Moonwalk Onstage (Rolling Stone)
• Britain is the Best Place to Die (Quartz)
• The enigma behind America’s freak, 20-year lobster boom (Quartz)
• 50 Powerful Examples Of Visual Propoganda And The Meanings Behind Them (Canva)
• Taking on the Drug Profiteers (New Yorker)
• Inside the race to stop the next mass shooter (MoJo)
• Thought process: Building an artificial brain. Paul Allen’s $500 million quest to dissect the mind and code a new one from scratch (Washington Post)
• The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (Brain Pickings)
• The Trouble with Theories of Everything (Nautilus)
• A Grand Juror Speaks: The inside story of how prosecutors always get their way (Harper’s) see also Is Scott Sanders the most polarizing man in Orange County? (OC Register)
• Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future of Computer Chips (NYT)
• The Jocks of Computer Code Do It for the Job Offers (Bloomberg)
• Why boring cities make for stressed citizens (Aeon) see also The Death and Life of Atlantic City (New Yorker)
• A Humble Proposition: How to Fix the Apple Watch (Yahoo)
• Product Placement: Selling the grasp for what isn’t there. (Lapham’s Quarterly)
• The inside of a WWI submarine was creepy and claustrophobic (Mashable)
• Another Dimension: Reconsidering Picasso the Sculptor (New Yorker)
• What does an electron cloud really look like? (Cosmos)
• The Most Diverse Cities Are Often The Most Segregated (FiveThirtyEight)
• How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis: David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment (The Atlantic)
• Why Can’t We Stop Talking About New York in the Late 1970s? (NYT)
• On How to Disagree (Book of Life)
• Born to Run and the Decline of the American Dream (The Atlantic)
• The Case for More Traffic Roundabouts (Priceonomics)
• The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration: American politicians are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system that’s left the U.S. with the largest incarcerated population in the world. But they’ve failed to reckon with history. (The Atlantic)
• Jeff Bezos (finally) pumps up the Post with Prime (Politico Media)
• How to build a sports superstar in 2015: The engineering of 15-year-old Josh McKenzie (NJ.com)
• Welcome to the Block Party: The internet after ad blocking (The Awl)
• In the blink of an eye: Some people suffer eye pain so excruciating they feel suicidal, yet ophthalmologists see nothing wrong. Meet the 82-year-old doctor whose radical idea about the real source of this pain is turning heads. (Mosaic)
• The Coddling of the American Mind: In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health. (The Atlantic)
• The Correlation Between Arts and Crafts and a Nobel Prize (Priceonomics)
• How psychedelia transformed pop culture: There are things known, and there are things unknown – and they’re all in Rob Chapman’s cultural history of LSD, Psychedelia and Other Colours (New Statesman)
• Shooter, Passer, Dictator, Spy: The Lost, True Story Of The CIA’s Greatest Basketball Coach (Buzzfeed) see also The Weight (Players’ Tribune)
• Ingenious: Nicholas Epley. Can we ever really know another person? (Nautilus)
• Beverly Hills’ $1 Billion “Vineyard”: The Bizarre Saga Behind L.A.’s Last Real Estate Trophy (Hollywood Reporter)
• “Never be afraid of stridency”: Richard Dawkins’ interview with Christopher Hitchens (New Statesman)
• Clearing Up Ambiguity (New York Review of Books)
• Let’s all go to Mars (London Review of Books)
• Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything: The banker who helped give the world credit-default swaps wants to upend finance again—this time with the code that powers bitcoin (Bloomberg)
• David Byrne’s Lending Library: A colorful case of the mosaic of influences that is art. (Brain Pickings)
• The Mothers of All Disasters: Massive hurricanes striking Miami or Houston. Earthquakes leveling Los Angeles or Seattle. Deadly epidemics. Meet the “maximums of maximums” that keep emergency planners up at night (The Atlantic)
• Hurricane Katrina: Beyond The Breach. A summer in search of saints, sinners and lost souls in the New Orleans that Katrina left behind (ESPN)
• The Neoliberal Arts: How college sold its soul to the market (Harper’s) see also The benefits of a liberal education do not go out of date (FT)
• The Business of Seal Clubbing (Priceonomics)
• Red planet rumble (Space Review)
• “Sorry, I’m not taking that test.” By the time she graduates, the average US student has gone through more than 113 standardized tests. This year, Kiana Hernandez became one of the growing number of students to say: Enough. (Mother Jones)
• The Teflon Toxin: DuPont and the Chemistry of Deception (The Intercept)
• Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s tough lessons for liberals (Prospect)
• Living in the age of permawar: These are anxious times. Terrorism seems an ever-present threat. We watch porn on computers. We are addicted to our phones. For some, religion offers answers … The novelist reflects on what bonds him with the rest of humanity (The Guardian)
• The World’s Greatest Jeweler (Intelligent Life)
•One of Tech’s Best Investors Keeps Passing on Deals Because Valuations Are Too Damn High (Re/code)
• Musings on Thomas Malthus, the Hellenistic Age, the Loyal-Spirit Great Kings of Iran 550-330 BCE, and Other Topics: The Honest Broker for the Week of August 17, 2015 (Bradford Delong)
• Meet the Guy Who Sorts All the World’s Numbers in His Attic (Wired)
~~~
• Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone: Our telephone habits have changed, but so have the infrastructure and design of the handset. (The Atlantic)
• The Tricks Used by Pilots, Surgeons & Engineers to Overcome Human Error (Nautilus)
• Why do archaeological fraudsters deceive us? (Aeon)
• The Great Sushi Craze of 1905, Part 1 (Eccentric Culinary)
• Gwyneth Paltrow Goes To Market (Fast Company)
• A Company Copes With Backlash Against the Raise That Roared (NYT)
• We Need to Talk About Ava (Medium)
• How Radio Explains America (Priceonomics)
• Why Disney and ESPN Will Be OK (Stratechery)
• Tennis Gets Hip to This Whole ‘Stats’ Thing (WSJ)
• I rode the Lexus hoverboard at a skatepark in Spain (The Verge)
• How Sugar Daddies Make It Happen (GQ)
• Stephen Colbert on Making The Late Show His Own (GQ)
• Is it ever worth not knowing the truth? (Aeon)
• The One-Man, $1.2 Billion ETF Shop: Andrew Chanin’s HACK is a rocket in an industry full of zombies (Bloomberg)
• Here’s a giant 800-track alt/indie-focused 90’s playlist in chronological order (Medium)
• The Reality of Color Is Perception (Nautilus)
• Stowaways and Crimes Aboard a Scofflaw Ship: Few places on Earth are as free from legal oversight as the high seas. One ship has been among the most persistent offenders. (NYT)
• You Just Got Out of Prison. Now What? (NYT)
• How A Small-Time Drug Dealer Rescued Dozens During Katrina (Buzzfeed)
• The Greatest Good: Inspired to make a meaningful donation, I wondered: What is the best charitable cause in the world, and was it crazy to think I could find it? (The Atlantic) see also When Mother Teresa Drives a Ferrari: Why “Compassionate Capitalism” is kind of a scam. (Medium)
• The Smartest Way to Take a Vacation: Scientists study how to get the most benefits in health and well-being from a getaway (WSJ)
• Jonathan Self on Dog Food: Dogs are like wolves and should be fed raw meat and bones, says the author and founder of Honey’s Real Dog Food company. He chooses the best books on dog food. (Five Books)
• Does Mindfulness Mean Anything? (NPR)
• Why the Dark Side of the Force Had to Be Dark (Nautilus)
• The Ban on Plastic Bags vs. the Ban on Bag Bans (NY Mag)
• Does Earth have a shadow biosphere? (Aeon)
• If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious (UC Riverside)
• Is this the solution to Japan’s glut of empty homes? (FT)
• The Pixar Theory of Labor (The Awl)
• 10 skills that are hard to learn but pay off forever (World Economic Forum)
• Telling Tales (Harvard Business Review)
• Josh Armstrong on Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (LA Review of Books)
• Buster Keaton’s Cure (Cabinet)
• Who Is a Corporation Supposed to Serve? (Bloomberg View)
• An Identity Thief Explains the Art of Emptying Your Bank Account (Bloomberg)
• Judd Apatow: The King of Comedy on his childhood, conquering Hollywood and why he still feels like an outsider. (Rolling Stone)
• What Some Pregnancy Centers Are Really Saying to Women With Unplanned Pregnancies (Cosmo)
• Is your fear of radiation irrational? Radioactivity stirs primal fears in many people, but Geoff Watts argues that an undue sense of its risks can cause real harm (Mosaic)
• Jerry Weintraub Presents! (Vanity Fair)
• Private I: Firefox and others deal with unwanted trackers, whether ads or malicious (MacWorld)
• Can SoundCloud Be the Facebook of Music? (Bloomberg)
• My Month of Hell in a Gay CrossFit Cult (Out)
• One Man’s Desperate Quest to Cure His Son’s Epilepsy—With Weed (Wired)
• People are violent because their morality demands it: Some people are ruthless. Some lose control. Yet most violence remains unfathomable. A new theory lights up the darkness (Aeon)
• The Rise and Fall of New York City’s Private Social Clubs (Curbed)
• I was an Invisible Girlfriend for a month (Fusion)
• Patents … There’s a Great Future in Patents. The Patent Office is a repository of Jewish innovation, from the baseball cap-cum-yarmulke to the KosherSwitch (Tablet)
• The importance of the antilibrary – converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns (Baldwin Boyle)
• The millionaire embezzler who became the Appalachian Trail’s most-wanted man (SB Nation)
• At age six, I ran away with my sister to escape the Rwandan massacre. We spent seven years as refugees. What do you want me to do about it? Cry? (Medium)
• Why Can’t We Fall Asleep? (New Yorker)
• Treasure In Heaven: St. Augustine and other early Christians challenged the Roman idea of charity by invoking the ultimate authority—God. (Lapham’s Quarterly)
• Law Enforcement’s ‘Warrior’ Problem (Harvard Law Review)
• What would you see on a journey to the centre of the Earth? (New Humanist)
• Why we need Arnold Toynbee’s good life (Aeon)
• The Michelin Woman (Lucky Peach)
• Jersey Boys: The governor and the Boss—a tale of politics, rock and roll, and unrequited love (The Atlantic)
• Museums Can Change—Will They? Our great art institutions are cheating us of our artistic patrimony every day, and if they wanted to, they could stop. (Democracy)
• Skyping with the enemy: I went undercover as a jihadi girlfriend (The Guardian)
• Whatever Happened to Surrender? (Chronicle of Higher Education)
~~~
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• The Sad State of the Financial Web: While buy-and-hold investors nearly always come out on top of active traders, you wouldn’t know it from searching the Web. (Fund Reference)
• Simple Rules for Healthy Eating (The Upshot)
• Why It Pays to Be a Jerk: New research confirms what they say about nice guys. (The Atlantic)
• Is This the Office of the Future or a $5 Billion Waste of Space? (Bloomberg)
• Listening to Xanax: How America learned to stop worrying about worrying and pop its pills instead. (NY Mag)
• My Letterman Years: Mafia hit men out for revenge. Drew Barrymore stripteases. Beer-guzzling camels. Madonna high on ‘endo.’ It was all in a day’s work in his first job out of college. These are Daniel Kellison’s memories of working for David Letterman in the 1990s. (Grantland)
• Object Lesson: Why we need physical books (New Republic)
• The Neoconservative Counterrevolution: In the anti-sixties backlash, neoconservatives were the most formidable intellectual opponents of social progress. (Jacobin)
• Sitting In On UPenn’s Controversial “Wasting Time on the Internet” Course (Slate)
• How to Make it On Social Media Without Really Trying (New Republic)
~~~~
• The Price of Nice Nails: Manicurists are routinely underpaid and exploited, and endure ethnic bias and other abuse, The New York Times has found. (NY Times)
• The Epic of a Genocide by James Reidel (NY Review of Books)
• 1991: The Most Important Year in Pop-Music History. Historical, musical, and quantitative evidence shows that the rise of rap is the most important thing that has ever happened to the genre. (The Atlantic)
• Judy Blume Knows All Your Secrets: After 17 years, the confidante for legions of young readers is about to publish a new novel for adults. (NY Times)
• The Shazam Effect: Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music? (The Atlantic)
• Your Home Doesn’t Matter for Tesla’s Dream of a Battery-Powered Planet (Bloomberg)
• The Inside Story of The Civil War For the Soul of NBC News (Vanity Fair)
• The Mastermind of Gay Marriage Is About to Become the Happiest Unemployed Person in America (Slate)
• How an American With a Knack for Math Saved India From Famine (Bloomberg)
• The Upwardly Mobile Barista: Starbucks and Arizona State University are collaborating to help cafe workers get college degrees. Is this a model for helping more Americans reach the middle class?
(The Atlantic)
• The Betrayal of Brazil: As a massive corruption scandal unfolds, Brazilians are facing some stark truths: The powerful and connected are still dividing the country’s riches among themselves. The past decade’s economic miracle was in large part a mirage. And the f