On Distractions
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
Widower Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Edith Galt in 1915. The President’s doorkeeper summarized the situation tersely:
“She’s a looker; he’s a goner.”
We Americans are notoriously bad at saving money. While people in Germany, Sweden and even France save about 10% of the money they make, folks in the U.S. save closer to 3 or 4% of their earnings. With so little money saved, Americans face difficulty absorbing economic shocks like recessions and layoffs, and also find…
Interesting take on the Bay of Pigs thinking in the Kennedy administration, as summarized in Jim Newton’s book on the Eisenhower Presidency: “The entire enterprise depended on an intelligence assumption that proved false, namely, that the Cuban people would greet the invasion force as liberators and turn against Castro.” Sounds eerily familiar to the Bush…
I’m currently in the middle of reading Robert Caro’s first book, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. I’ll be blogging intermittently about this wonderful book over the next few weeks. Expect a few of those posts to be focused on drawing writing lessons from this wonderful author. But a relatively…
I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius: Is everybody on board with my reasoning? (Click here to view comments)
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…
I’ve been teaching college for four years now, at a pretty darn good college. But I’m not sure I’ve seen student writing quite as good as this undergraduate writing sample: There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal….