Great Bits

Joel Stein for the New York Times:

The only thing more embarrassing than catching a guy on the plane looking at pornography on his computer is seeing a guy on the plane reading “The Hunger Games.” Or a Twilight book. Or Harry Potter. The only time I’m O.K. with an adult holding a children’s book is if he’s moving his mouth as he reads.

Joel Stein clearly lives in a world where it’s important that men are seen as men. And that other men on a plane (who you will never see again in your life) know that you are a man. And a good way to be seen as a man on a airplane to your fellow passengers, is to read manly books.

I appreciate that adults occasionally watch Pixar movies or play video games. That’s fine. Those media don’t require much of your brains. Books are one of our few chances to learn.

Video games don’t require much of your brain? Either Joel Stein doesn’t play video games, or he is really bad at them (a third possibility: he believes that Angry Birds is an example of a difficult video game).

I don’t think Joel’s opinion on what to read is very important. But it does make me concerned that Joel might be nervously choosing his books based on what strangers around him think of the dust jacket. Joel, just get a kindle.

Susana Polo on the troubling idea of people assumed to be interested in ‘geek culture’ only for male attention, the ‘fake’ geek girls:

But who are you to say that a stranger, someone you’re never likely to meet, is not genuinely interested in the thing they appear to be interested in? Who are you? I just… what? I’m rendered incoherent.

Teju Cole on Kony 2012:

How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives. A great deal of work had been done, and continues to be done, by Ugandans to improve their own country, and ignorant comments (I’ve seen many) about how “we have to save them because they can’t save themselves” can’t change that fact.

Annie Murphy Paul for the New York Times

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

CHRISTOPHER SHEA

Chrstopher Shea for the WSJ:

When the scientists analyzed the data, they found striking patterns not just in English but also in Spanish and Hebrew. There has been, the authors say, a “dramatic shift in the birth rate and death rates of words”: Deaths have increased and births have slowed.

Adam Weinstein for Mother Jones

“Are you following him?” the dispatcher asked. Zimmerman replied: “Yep.”

“Okay, we don’t need you to do that,” the dispatcher warned.

Several minutes later, according to other callers to 911 in the neighborhood, Zimmerman and Martin got into a wrestling match on the ground. One of the pair could be heard screaming for help. Then a single shot rang out, and Martin lay dead.

Tim Carmody for Wired:

When Wikipedia emerged five years later, Britannica was already a weakened giant. It wasn’t a free and open encyclopedia that defeated its print edition. It was the personal computer itself.

Sara Robinson for Slate/Alternet:

The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision.

Michael J. Sandelfor the Atlantic on runaway capitalism:

These uses of markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods were for the most part unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.

Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?

Nilay Patel for The Verge:

A new episode of This American Life detailing the issues and what happened airs later today, with an MP3 of the broadcast available Sunday. Host Ira Glass is taking full responsibility for the error, saying that he’s “horrified to have let something like this onto public radio.”

I’ve been a dedicated This American Life listener for years, and I have never heard them fully retract and entire episode, let alone dedicate an entire second episode to the retraction.

Bonus fun: As far as I can tell The Verge was the first tech blog to report this story. They accidentally referred to This American Life as an NPR production rather than a Public Radio International production. An innocent mistake, which will you can now use to track the tech blogs shamelessly rewriting articles from The Verge.