I see that the accused murderer of Brian Thompson, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, is about to go on trial. Which is reminding me of the collective insanity that I saw take over this country at the end of 2024 when he murdered Thompson. So I just want to refresh people’s minds here: murder is bad, actually, and &ellipsis;Read the full post »
Cut it out.
Amazon obviously doesn’t need my endorsement; they’d be doing fine even if I never said that #actually they’re pretty good. But…it was Friday evening, and we were going to be having people over on the 4th for barbecuing and cocktaillery and such, so I placed a Whole Foods order at 9:57pm, and it was delivered &ellipsis;Read the full post »
I would say that among my demographic, the primary attitude toward the United States is doomerism: everything sucks, Trump showed that the country is filled with fascists, our best days are behind us, etc. I think That’s wrong This is a great country What we have is primarily a problem of leadership; remember how great &ellipsis;Read the full post »
I feel like people who grew up with today’s Internet—even some older folks—aren’t aware of what we had to do back in the day if we wanted to consume “porn.” I put that in quotes because, by the modern standard whereby porn is practically wallpaper, what we had to look at was remarkably tame. (This &ellipsis;Read the full post »
This is really just my way of endorsing, from whichever mountaintop I’m able to yell it from, the book A Mathematician’s Lament. It sings to my soul, and it informs a lot of how I think about both education and math. If you’ve ever felt like the mathematics education you got was boring, and focused &ellipsis;Read the full post »
Hello everyone! It has been a while. It’s been 8 years, basically. Things that have changed since then: I’ve had two kids. I have less time to read than I did in 2018 (see the part about the kids, just above) Things that were true in 2018 that I might not have remarked upon at &ellipsis;Read the full post »
There’s a weird disconnect between the most widely read of Max Weber’s works, and what I understand to be the most influential. Granted that I’m not a professional sociologist, but most of what I see cited among Weber’s works are “Politics as a Vocation,” containing Weber’s famous definition of a state as a human community &ellipsis;Read the full post »
I’m working backwards through my podcast queue, having for a couple reasons developed quite a backlog, so I just got to Ezra Klein’s discussion with Yascha Mounk about whether American democracy is in decline. The discussion is worth listening to, but Klein makes an argument that I’ve heard often and that just seems wrong. The &ellipsis;Read the full post »
Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs Combines a popularization of some economic theory—of the sort that you’d read in Fujita, Krugman, and Venables, for instance—with the sort of boilerplate that you’d expect out of any popular work of economics nowadays. The author has to travel to see how Innovation is being done in various &ellipsis;Read the full post »