Hoshein Derakhshan has a thoughtful post on Medium entitled “Text vs. World Trumps“. The idea that the prominence of video on the Web is detrimental to political discourse is not new, but he makes a compelling case that it has become a threat to our civilization. Food for thought: How can we fight against this?
Category: Uncategorized
Yonatan Zunger about fear, exhaustion, but also hope
Here is an excellent post by Yonatan Zunger about how the Internet has developed into a “moral prosthesis” that lets us know about and empathize with the troubles of people everywhere. This is exhausting, but it may well lead to strengthening our social bonds, when we learn how to manage the stress it comes with. I strongly recommend reading the original at the link.
An excellent sunset
I was in Ocean City, NJ, recently, and on July 5th I was able to capture a beautiful sunset. Enjoy it here or in the slideshow below, which seems to require Flash:
Yellow flower
2015 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 28 trips to carry that many people.
Ideas for reforming college in the U.S.
The Brookings Institution has collected eight ideas for reforming college, to help promote social mobility, here. I tend to think #3 is the best of these, although I would not want to make higher education totally tuition free for all students, especially those who have the means to pay.
Scalloped edges
Image captured at Meadowbrook Farms, Abington, PA.
Interesting read
I promise in the Hello World post at the top of this blog that the blog would be an attempt to gather at least some of my disparate posts online in one place. In this spirit, let me share here that I was intrigued by this review in the Economist and this post by Paul Romer enough to buy Hidalgo’s book. Since promising to blog about it here might help motivate me to read it soon (by creating some time carved out from my time on social media, which I know I should be doing much more), I hereby promise to blog about this book soon.
Jeffrey Sachs on the failure of EU governance
As the EU is on the verge of throwing Greece out (bath water, follow baby), Jeffrey Sachs has published an excellent critique of EU governance.
Greece from Postwar Orthodoxy to “Democratic Peronism”
I found this long and persuasive essay about the “democratic Peronism” in Greece and its gradual destruction of the economic future of the country fascinating and convincing. Note the paragraph about the extent of tax evasion in Greece. It is astonishing.
The roots of the present Greek crisis lie in the political transformation of the country during the 1980s. (Disclaimer: Although this post is about Greek fiscal behaviour, I am not taking Germany’s side. Lenders to the profligate are just as culpable as the borrowers.)
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The curious incident of DD on the Web 