May 2011
5 posts
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The Last Post →
Here it is. I’m dead, and this is my last post to my blog. In advance, I asked that once my body finally shut down from the punishments of my cancer, then my family and friends publish this prepared message I wrote—the first part of the process of turning this from an active website to an archive.
Penmachine
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Why I Blog →
The blog remained a superficial medium, of course. By superficial, I mean simply that blogging rewards brevity and immediacy. No one wants to read a 9,000-word treatise online. On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is...
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The Art of Good Writing →
What, at base, is a sentence? [Fish] asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students “nothing about how to write”. Instead, we should be examining the “logical relationships” within different sentence forms to see how they organise the world. His argument is that you can learn to write and later become a good writer by...
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Montaigne’s Moment →
It’s been said — by Bakewell, with reservations, and others — that Montaigne was the first blogger. His favorite subject, as he often remarked, was himself (“I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero”), and he meant to leave nothing out (“I am loath even to have thoughts which I cannot publish”). Some of his critics accused him of, in effect, oversharing, in the manner of a narcissistic...
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George Orwell: Why I Write →
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby...
April 2011
48 posts
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Mac vs. PC →
Back in ye olden days of Hunch — November 2009 — we explored the differences in personality, aesthetic tastes, and media preferences between Mac and PC users. Since then, the Hunch user base and question pool have grown many times over. The 2009 report started with more than 76,000 responses to its base “Mac or PC?” question. The same question now has nearly 400,000 responses. This is all in the...
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Jonathan Ive: How Did a British Polytechnic... →
It is hard to know what is the greater intrigue: recent conjecture that he is preparing to walk away from Apple to relocate to his beautiful Grade II-listed mansion in Somerset so his children can be educated in the UK (false – he is not, and the property is now standing empty); that he will step out of the shadows and assume Steve Jobs’ role when the great man stands down (highly doubtful); or...
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Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible →
Four years ago, he announced in a memo to his employees that he had undergone surgery, that the surgery was for the removal of a malignant tumor, that the tumor was on his pancreas, and that the surgery was, as he put it, successful. An exceptional man who specializes in exceptionalizing himself — he has been an economic force for thirty years, and it’s still hard to put him in a...
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Trouble @Twitter →
There’s no shortage of drama at Twitter these days: Besides the CEO shuffles, there are secret board meetings, executive power struggles, a plethora of coaches and consultants, and disgruntled founders. (Like Williams. The day after Dorsey announced his return to the company — via tweet, naturally — Williams quit his day-to-day duties at the company, although he remains a board...
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The Real History Of Twitter →
How Twitter’s owners and top executives say Twitter was founded is different than how Twitter was actually founded. Mainly, the official version leaves out the role of a major cofounder. Some early Twitter investors also wonder if it also leaves out a scandal. … Twitter is now worth more than $5 billion – and climbing toward $10 billion on secondary markets – so it’s worth...
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Twitter's Forgotten Cofounder →
Odeo was supposed to be a podcasting platform. But then Apple launched iTunes and everyone at Odeo panicked. Williams told everyone: come up with something for us to do next! … Along with Jack Dorsey and a developer named Florian Webber, Glass pitched something called Twitter. Glass came up with the name. Williams liked it enough to put Glass in charge. The product became Glass’s...
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Lawyers: You’re Being Played By Twitter →
The true shining example of a social media service exploiting gamification to its fullest is Twitter. While there is no formal leader board or badges or achievement system (though Klout sprung up to meet that need); it doesn’t take new users long to become keenly aware of their number of “Followers,” @replies, “Re-Tweets,” and Lists (“engagement statistics”). By having its users engagement...
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For Twitter Founder Evan Williams, Anything Could... →
As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer—having been featured in an episode of CSI, on MTV, and in nearly every major newspaper—but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month), and there are no immediate plans...
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Twitter Was Act One →
Dorsey may belong to Gen X, but he is a throwback to a kind of heartland idealism we associate with earlier generations. His optimism flows mostly from a St. Louis-bred spirit about our common life, democracy, and human potential. He claims his inventions all aim at the same goal: a society that works more efficiently and humanely. “My role as an observer and as a technologist,” he says as he...
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Are You Following A Bot? →
One day last February, a Twitter user in California named Billy received a tweet from @JamesMTitus, identified in his profile as a “24 year old dude” from Christchurch, New Zealand, who had the avatar of a tabby cat. “If you could bring one character to life from your favorite book, who would it be?,” @JamesMTitus asked. Billy tweeted back, “Jesus,” to which @JamesMTitus replied: “honestly? no...
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Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science →
He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us...
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First Do No Harm →
Georgeanne Mumm’s surgeon emerged from the operating room with welcome news for her worried family. He had removed her cancerous kidney, he said, and her outlook looked good. … The surgeon failed to mention, however, that he also had accidentally removed part of her pancreas, having mistaken it for a tumor. Nor did he mention that he had in-advertently cut the blood flow to her spleen,...
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The Panic Virus →
When Kelly Lacek’s chiropractor told her that vaccines had been linked to autism, he was repeating the most recent of hundreds of years’ worth of fears about vaccinations. The roots of this latest alarm dated back to 1998, when a British gastroenterologist named Andrew Wakefield claimed to have discovered a new gut disorder associated with the MMR vaccine—and with autism. Wakefield...
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Bad Science →
Interestingly, Matthias Rath’s colleague and employee, a South African barrister named Anthony Brink, takes the credit for introducing Thabo Mbeki to many of these ideas. Brink stumbled on the “AIDS dissident” material in the mid-1990s, and after much surfing and reading, became convinced that it must be right. In 1999 he wrote an article about AZT in a Johannesburg newspaper titled “a medicine...
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The iPod Has Changed the Way We Listen to Music →
The concern that recorded music promotes solipsism and isolation isn’t new. Before the invention of the record and the gramophone (1887), the only form of listening people knew was social; the closest thing to a private musical experience was playing an instrument for yourself, or silently looking over a score. More often, if you had the means, you got to sit in the panopticon of the...
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The MP3: A History Of Innovation And Betrayal →
We tried to tell the people from music industry early on, and we tried to discuss possibilities how to react to this … The idea was that the music industry wouldn’t just be able to go on, they would have to adapt to the situation as well, and if we now look back these 15 years we have to say they finally did but it was too slow and some strategic errors in there.”
National...
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Why Conservatives Should Read Marx →
If they want to be consistent, conservatives ought really to be anti-capitalist. This may be a little surprising, but in point of fact conservatism has always been flexible as far as particular policies are concerned. In the U.S. conservatives oppose universal healthcare as an attack on freedom; in the U.K. they defend it as a national tradition. Both positions count as conservative because, as...
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In Praise of Marx →
The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called “generalized...
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Aftershock: The Blast That Shook Psycho Platoon →
More than 2 million troops have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Tens of thousands have returned with a bedeviling mix of psychological and cognitive problems. For decades, doctors have recognized that soldiers can suffer lasting wounds from the sheer terror of combat, a condition referred to today as post-traumatic stress disorder. They also have come to know that blows to the head...
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The Afghanistan "Kill Team" Photos: A Soldier's... →
It will center on the belief that we don’t look at the Taliban as human in any way. They are sick, vile, evil, and despicable people and because of that, some soldiers may not look at these actions as somehow wrong. … It would be akin to showing off a trophy hog kill after it just killed your dog and ate your chickens or something (I live on a farm). But, that does NOT make it right, and...
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The Kill Team →
After the killing, the soldiers involved in Mudin’s death were not disciplined or punished in any way. Emboldened, the platoon went on a shooting spree over the next four months that claimed the lives of at least three more innocent civilians. When the killings finally became public last summer, the Army moved aggressively to frame the incidents as the work of a “rogue unit”...
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The Dark Side of the New Theories of Success →
If the times help explain the resurgence of genius-isn’t-in-your-genes proselytizers (they have been around before), the writers in turn shed light on the times. In particular, they call attention to our conflicted views of a crucial ingredient of this current “talent code”: hard work. In their calculus of success, these books endorse perspiration over inspiration as the key to...
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Success And Motivation →
Finally, Doug spoke up. He asked me. “What do you do if a customer has a question about a software package and you don’t know the answer?” All of the possible answers raced through my mind. I had to ask myself if this was the “honesty test question” you know where they want to see if you will admit to things you don’t know. Is this some trick technology question and there is an answer everyone...
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What Traits Predict Success? →
What are the causes of success? At first glance, the answer is easy: success is about talent. It’s about being able to do something – hit a baseball, play chess, trade stocks, write a blog – better than most anyone else. That’s a fine answer, but it immediately invites another question: What is talent? How did that person get so good at hitting a baseball or trading stocks? For a long time,...
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Glenn Beck Inc →
Mercury Radio Arts, formed in 2002, holds all the pieces of Beck’s media dominions, managing the live performances and producing (or co-producing) the radio and TV broadcasts and everything on the Web. At the center is Christopher Balfe, the 31-year-old president of Mercury. He first flung himself at Beck 14 years ago in New Haven after the radio host announced on the air he needed someone...
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Being Glenn Beck →
At some point in the past few months, Beck ceased being just the guy who cries a lot on Fox News or a “rodeo clown” (as he has described himself) or simply a voice of the ultraconservative opposition to President Obama. In record time, Beck has traveled the loop of curiosity to ratings bonanza to self-parody to sage. It is remarkable to think he has been on Fox News only since January...
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The Making of Glenn Beck →
Since launching his talk radio career in the late ’90s, Beck has constructed a persona anchored in a biography of struggle and redemption. It is a narrative with shades of another haunted Washingtonian who found entertainment fame, Kurt Cobain. Both men hailed from broken homes in the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Both men would find youthful fortune behind microphones while struggling with...
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Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? →
Glenn Beck: the pudgy, buzz-cut, weeping phenomenon of radio, TV and books. Our hot summer of political combat is turning toward an autumn of showdowns over some of the biggest public-policy initiatives in decades. The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation — poured abundantly over Obama’s presidential campaign a year ago — have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness....
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Is Glenn Beck the Most Annoying Man on TV? →
Beck is less worried about saying the wrong thing, though, than doing the wrong thing. He’s uncomfortable giving the Virginia killer the glory he sought, and he’s been struggling with whether to show the video manifesto on his program. And here’s where he starts to sound distinctly unlike the smug know-it-alls he’s often lumped with—the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters....
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The Beck of Revelation →
Beck is the most gifted demagogue America has produced since Father Coughlin made his populist broadcasts during the Great Depression. In the course of one radio or television show he can transform himself from conspiracy nut and character assassin into bawling, repentant screw-up, then back to gold-hoarding Jeremiah, and finally to man of God, without ever falling out of character. Which is the...
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Search Optimization and Its Dirty Little Secrets →
With more than 1,100 stores and $17.8 billion in total revenue in 2010, [J.C.] Penney is certainly a major player in American retailing. But Google’s stated goal is to sift through every corner of the Internet and find the most important, relevant Web sites. … Does the collective wisdom of the Web really say that Penney has the most essential site when it comes to dresses? And bedding? And...
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Search And Destroy →
Vaidhyanathan instead focuses on the lack of regulation of search engines. Courts in the United States, for instance, have held that Google may rank sites according to whatever criteria it likes—however capricious or misleading that may be—even though a sudden change in rankings can effectively destroy sites that rely on search traffic for business. But if a monopoly of search is almost...
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New York Times Paywall: Wishful Thinking Or Just... →
Meanwhile, the paywall just makes it harder to link to the Times, reducing its significance to people who use the net for news (that is, everyone with money to spend, give or take). I don’t know what will work for the Times, and I applaud experimentation, but it seems to me that you should design your experiments with graceful failure modes. Spending a year or two or three not being linked...
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That Was Quick →
And yet this workaround is so blindingly obvious to anyone who’s ever worked with code that it’s difficult to imagine it didn’t come up in the paywall planning process. The other major news paywalls — WSJ, FT, The Economist — don’t actually send the entire forbidden article to your browser, then try cover it up with a couple lines of easily reversible code. They just hit you with a message...
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What Was The NYT Magazine Like 100 Years Ago? →
One great thing about reading magazine articles from 100 years ago is that I can research what eventually happened to the people in the articles. When I read the details of a murder, I can search news archives to find out if the suspect was eventually convicted. When I posted an article about a man who gave to the public domain his patent for telephone multiplexing, the technology that allows...
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Why the NYT Will Lose to HuffPo →
Still, the difference between the two pages is much starker than it needs to be: the NYT page is like walking into a library, while the HuffPo page is like walking through Times Square. The HuffPo page is full of links to interesting stories elsewhere on the site — about Egypt, or the kid in the Superbowl Darth Vader ad, or the stories my Facebook friends are reading. And there are lot of links...
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The Purpose of Science Fiction →
[S]cience-fiction writers … get to talk about the real meaning of research. We’re not beholden to skittish funding bodies and so are free to speculate about the full range of impacts that new technologies might have—not just the upsides but the downsides, too. And we always look at the human impact rather than couching research in vague, nonthreatening terms. … We also...
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H G Wells: Another Kind of Life →
Only during his second marriage did he give in fully to the demands of his inner Lothario. What the saintly Jane Wells thought about his behaviour can only be imagined – she seems to have spent a lot of time gardening – but after meeting her, Wells clearly decided to push the idea of a “marriage licence” in a wholly new direction. Dorothy Richardson (“most interestingly hairy”), the daughter of...
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The God In the Trash: The Fantastic Life and... →
Eleven years after his removal to a Colorado graveyard, Philip K. Dick is among the busiest of American writers. New novels arrive regularly from the tomb; box office smashes (Total Recall) and Hollywood classics (Blade Runner) are spliced from his work; young writers of diverse persuasions sit raptly at his icy feet. A science fiction journeyman, ardent bohemian and restless observer of...
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Mythologist of Our Age →
The best stories have a strange familiarity about them. They’re like long-forgotten acquaintances—you know you’ve met them somewhere before. There is, for instance, the tale of the time traveler who goes back into time and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing irrevocably the course of history (“A Sound of Thunder”). There’s the one about the man who...
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The Curious Case Of Sidd Finch →
The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets’ front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick’s Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to...
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The US vs Barry Bonds →
There is an underpinning of truth to the premise that the government has ill-served the people with its Ahab-like pursuit of Bonds. Federal prosecutors not working the Bonds case privately complain about the resources dedicated to his prosecution. Because of budget cuts, they are working shorthanded on drug and immigration cases, issues they would argue are far more important than nailing one...
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Going...Going...Gone →
As he waited in line, his imposing frame and enormous head must have stood out among the travelers queued up to have their passports stamped. But nobody paid the former Giant any attention. … Which is exactly how he wanted it. In Canada, Bonds was thousands of miles removed from the booing fans, scrum of reporters, and generally unwanted scrutiny that has dogged him for more than five...
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Fascination with the Fastball →
The fastball is the Lamborghini of pitching: Sexy and sleek, it turns heads as it passes by with a dangerous if darkly pleasing whoosh. From Walter Johnson to Bob Feller to Steve Dalkowski to Nolan Ryan to Sidd Finch to Nuke LaLoosh to Rick Vaughn to Colt Griffin to Joel Zumaya to Chapman, the fastball has blazed across baseball history, leaving a vapor trail of stories true and imagined....