Remake ‘Made in America’

Greenfield and Clark make the case for changing tax incentives around construction and real estate, in order to finally solve the problems that led to the housing bubble and encourage sustainability:

The problem today is that neither individual homebuyers nor even larger commercial builders drive “market forces.” Instead, the market for real estate construction comprises managers of hedge funds and speculators who buy buildings and homes as rental properties. They are waiting for the value of the buildings to rise, as they had before the 2008 collapse. By early 2014, these high-volume buyers will most likely be near their short-term return on investment (ROI) with their investors and therefore looking to sell.

Published: Oct 29, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,771 words)

The Old Man Next Door

A look at mob boss “Whitey” Bulger’s last days while living in an apartment complex in Los Angeles:

Catalina Schlank, who is 90, has lived at the Princess Eugenia since moving there in 1974, a decade after arriving from Argentina. To her the pair had a storybook quality. “They were nice neighbors and courteous with me,” says Schlank. “They were elegant. You could just picture them as a young couple.” She remembers how Greig would place tenants’ mail on their doorsteps, since the letter carrier usually dumped onto the floor whatever didn’t fit into the tiny boxes. Schlank still has some of the notes Greig gave her, written in tall, clear cursive letters, to express appreciation for the occasional pieces of fruit or a pocketbook the older woman had given her. “Many thanks for the American Hero stationery.” “Hope you have a great month. (March already!)” Bulger had written thank-yous as well. Schlank found him nothing but a courtly, caring figure of a man who insisted on carrying her luggage should he see her with a suitcase and who once, without warning or explanation, came over and enthusiastically hugged her.

Published: Oct 23, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,621 words)

How Google Used a ‘Double Irish’ and ‘Dutch Sandwich’ to Shave $2.2 Billion from Its Tax Bill

The story of how Ireland became a global hub for tax avoidance, with companies including Google, Apple, Intel and others all taking advantage. Feargal O’Rourke is credited with helping create an environment where companies can come to Ireland to avoid taxes they’d face in their home countries:

“Under no circumstances is Ireland a tax haven,” O’Rourke said recently at his corner office on the River Liffey in Dublin, a ritual stop for many tech companies in their Irish quest. “I’m a player in this game and we play by the rules.”

Source: Bloomberg
Published: Oct 28, 2013
Length: 12 minutes (3,021 words)

Nick Brown Smelled Bull

Brown is a 50-year-old British man who took a class on positive psychology when he “smelled bullshit”—a widely cited paper published in American Psychologist claiming there was a “positivity ratio” for happiness:

He had been poring over the original papers that informed Fredrickson and Losada’s 2005 article—papers written or co-written by Marcial Losada. They seemed “sketchy,” Brown says. In his research on business teams, for instance, “the length of the business meetings weren’t even mentioned.”

“Normally you have a method and the method says we selected these people and we picked these numbers and here’s the tables and here are the means and here’s the standard deviation,” Brown says. “He just goes: ‘Satisfied that the model fit my data, I then ran some simulations.’ The whole process was indistinguishable from him having made the data up.”

Source: Narratively
Published: Oct 28, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,515 words)

Book of Lamentations: A ‘Review’ of DSM-5

A book review that imagines the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a dystopian novel:

The author (or authors) writes under the ungainly nom de plume of The American Psychiatric Association—although a list of enjoyably silly pseudonyms is provided inside (including Maritza Rubio-Stipec, Dan Blazer, and the superbly alliterative Susan Swedo). The thing itself is on the cumbersome side. Over two inches thick and with a thousand pages, it’s unlikely to find its way to many beaches. Not that this should deter anyone; within is a brilliantly realized satire, at turns luridly absurd, chillingly perceptive, and profoundly disturbing.

Author: Sam Kriss
Source: The New Inquiry
Published: Oct 27, 2013
Length: 10 minutes (2,647 words)

What Is Art?

An installation by Playboy riles residents in the small town of Marfa, Texas and has everyone wondering: Is it art or advertising?:

Dick DeGuerin, a subscriber to the Sentinel, was at home in Houston when he read the news. A week later, the lawyer was flying his Cessna back from a spa day with his daughter in Mexico and decided to stop in Marfa for a Jimmie Dale Gilmore concert. The bunny, which had gone up in a matter of days, was all anyone could talk about. Some people got a kick out of it: there was Bob Wright, the white-mustachioed owner of Marfa Realty, who had initially put Playboy in touch with six area landowners, and Ty Mitchell, a rakish cowboy who’d had a part in True Grit and helped persuade the Eppenauers to lease their land. (Though Sheri had twice rejected the lease, when Playboy allegedly tripled its first offering, to $20,000 for twelve months, she sought the permission of her preacher and the school principal before signing.) Some ropers and mechanics expressed excitement, and a few creative types, such as Marfa Film Festival director Robin Lambaria, thought it made a funny contrast to the town’s serious art scene.

Source: Texas Monthly
Published: Oct 24, 2013
Length: 20 minutes (5,238 words)

Reading List: The Culture of Cosplayers

This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Kotaku, Racialicious, Buzzfeed, and Autostraddle.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 27, 2013

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think

Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, is on a quest to redefine what we call artificial intelligence—saying that current advancements do not go far enough to understand the human mind:

Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?” A brand of AI that didn’t try to answer such questions—however impressive it might have been—was, in Hofstadter’s mind, a diversion. He distanced himself from the field almost as soon as he became a part of it. “To me, as a fledgling AI person,” he says, “it was self-evident that I did not want to get involved in that trickery. It was obvious: I don’t want to be involved in passing off some fancy program’s behavior for intelligence when I know that it has nothing to do with intelligence. And I don’t know why more people aren’t that way.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Oct 27, 2013
Length: 29 minutes (7,486 words)

The Battle for Picasso’s Mind

[NSFW] Tom Braden launched CNN’s political talk show Crossfire and inspired the father figure on the TV show Eight Is Enough. In the 1950s, Braden also launched a CIA mission to use modern art to fight communism:

Braden’s operation was a success. One of the world’s most famous and influential painters, Gerhard Richter, would later attribute his defection from East Germany to his viewing of abstract expressionist art. In 1959, at documenta II, an art show started in 1955 by a West German artist and professor to display modern artwork suppressed by the Nazis, Richter viewed work by artists including Pollock. Afterward Richter realized, “There was something wrong with my whole way of thinking…expression of a totally different and entirely new content.” In a letter to his former art teacher in East Germany, Richter explained why he risked his life: “The reasons are largely due to my career.… When I say cultural ‘climate’ in the West offers me and my artistic endeavors more, that is more compatible with my way of being and my way of working than the East, I am pointing out the main reason behind my decision.”

Source: Playboy
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Length: 28 minutes (7,204 words)

We’ve Reached ‘The End of Antibiotics, Period.’

An interview with Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, associate director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about entering a new era in which bacteria is resistant to antibiotics:

The more you use an antibiotic, the more you expose a bacteria to an antibiotic, the greater the likelihood that resistance to that antibiotic is going to develop. So the more antibiotics we put into people, we put into the environment, we put into livestock, the more opportunities we create for these bacteria to become resistant. …We also know that we’ve greatly overused antibiotics and in overusing these antibiotics, we have set ourselves up for the scenario that we find ourselves in now, where we’re running out of antibiotics.

Author: Editors
Source: Frontline
Published: Oct 26, 2013
Length: 36 minutes (9,234 words)