Archive for the 'magazines' Category

Assorted Links

Saturday, October 8th, 2011
  • The Shangri-La Diet: still too good to be true. It was my dream — and maybe every scientist’s dream — to discover something (a) useful and (b) counter-intuitive, the more surprising the better. It did not occur to me that (a) and (b) conflict. I think that more surprising discoveries are eventually more useful (as logic suggests), but it takes much longer.
  • Marisa Tomei wants to play Jane Jacobs. “I love that she saved Greenwich Village.” When she does, perhaps Robert Caro will post the unpublished Jane Jacobs chapter of The Power Broker.
  • Symposium on The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
  • Did you know that Mindy Kaling’s amusing article in this week’s New Yorker is an excerpt from a forthcoming book? Neither did I. Likewise, the recent Murakami story Town of Cats was from a forthcoming book. The New Yorker, unlike other magazines, never identifies book excerpts. This  is unfortunate because doing so would help both writers (sell books) and readers (find books to read). For more criticism of  The New Yorker, see the great book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker by Renata Adler.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

The Rules of the Tunnel by Ned Zeman

Wednesday, August 24th, 2011

I loved Ned Zeman’s new book The Rules of the Tunnel, which I read during a long plane flight. Not only does it combine three of my favorite subjects — high-end magazines, bipolar disorder, and the crappiness of modern psychiatry — but it’s very well-written and revealing. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.

Zeman once wrote for Spy, as did I. Long ago, I met him at a Spy party. I suppose I could have gotten a free copy of his book but I bought it. I wanted something great to read on the plane.

Edward Jay Epstein Offer

Sunday, July 31st, 2011

Edward Jay Epstein, the investigative journalist whom I praise here, offers free copies of his latest books (which include Myths of the Media, Who Killed God’s Banker?, and Armand Hammer, The Darker Side, all Amazon Kindles) to those who will write Amazon reviews. I took him up on it. You can reach him at ed ~at~ edwardjayepstein.com.

Assorted Links

Monday, June 6th, 2011

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.

Assorted Links

Friday, May 20th, 2011

Thanks to Paul Sas and Gary Wolf.

Assorted Links

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Scientific Illiteracy at The New Yorker

Saturday, April 30th, 2011

A week ago, this passage appeared in an article about timing and the brain:

If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

As if people had three ears. “Triangulating between the three points” is gibberish. The between-ear time-of-arrival comparison gives you a direction, not a location (which is what triangulation does). Perhaps it was added by a copy editor. If you delete it, the passage makes sense.

Wouldn’t that make a nice newsbreak (one of The New Yorker’s column-ending “Funny Usage Mistakes Made by Other Publications”)? I tried to submit it but couldn’t. So I wrote a Letter to the Editor about it.

In this week’s issue, Hendrik Hertzberg, the magazine’s main editorial writer, calls the idea that “global warming is a hoax” a “denial of reality”. He lumps it with birtherism and the ideas that “evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.” In case you are reading this blog for the first time, I’ll say it again: Claims that humans have dangerously warmed the planet are based on climate models that are far from fully verified. That these models manage to fit past temperatures means little because the models have many adjustable parameters. Alas, this was no over-zealous editing mistake.

Spy Magazine Available Online

Sunday, March 6th, 2011

Thanks to this article, I learned that many issues of Spy magazine have become available at Google Books (here). I loved Spy. In the last few years it got much worse but before that I would often read each issue three times. Now you can judge for yourself.

“Do a Small Thing”: Good Advice For Revolutionaries and Scientists

Friday, February 18th, 2011

This is the best magazine article I have read in a long time. The subtitle is “What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic”, a good description. The Serbian students who overthrew Milosevic had several lessons for budding revolutionaries in other countries, such as Egypt and Burma. One was/is:

Do a small thing and if it is successful, you have the confidence to do another one and another one.

Much like my advice about science: Do the smallest easiest thing that will tell you something. You will learn more from it than you expect. If someone criticizes a study for being “small” they are saying “1 + 1 = 3″. If someone does a large study that fails, they are saying the same thing.

Via Long Form. I knew little about the author, Tina Rosenberg, before this. I am looking forward to reading the book about peer pressure from which this article was taken.

AI at IBM

Saturday, February 12th, 2011
  1. playing chess
  2. playing Jeopardy!
  3. writing New Yorker cartoon captions