Why Are Spy Researchers Building a ‘Metaphor Program’?

That’s right, metaphors, like Shakespeare’s famous line, “All the world’s a stage,” or more subtly, “The darkness pressed in on all sides.” Every speaker in every language in the world uses them effortlessly, and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity wants know how what we say reflects our worldviews. They call it The Metaphor Program, and it is a unique effort within the government to deal with how we use words.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 24, 2011
Length: 11 minutes (2,776 words)

The Beast Within

Turned on by “Taking On Tyson,” earlier this spring I immersed myself in the variegated programming of Animal Planet. As buds popped outside the window and vernally intoxicated squirrels chased their tails, I watched “Animal Cops: Miami, Infested!,” “Fatal Attractions” (exotic pets attacking their owners), and “Yellowstone: Battle for Life.” I watched and watched. Love the honey-colored Labrador, revile the giant stingray: this is the spectrum of human response to animals, more or less, and wherever along it you care to place your finger, you’ll find an Animal Planet show.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,503 words)

Hillary Clinton: Chinese System Is Doomed, Leaders on a ‘Fool’s Errand’

In an exclusive interview, the secretary of state says Beijing’s human rights record is “deplorable” and it is “trying to stop history” by opposing the advance of democracy. “It was during this part of the conversation, when the subject of China, and its frightened reaction to the Arab Spring, came up, that she took an almost-Reaganesque turn, calling into question not just Beijing’s dismal human rights record, but the future of the Chinese regime itself.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 10, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,857 words)

Man vs. Machine on Wall Street: How Computers Beat the Market

Cliff Asness’s Applied Quantitative Research—which makes its fortune, like other “quants,” by using high-speed computers and financial models of extraordinary complexity—has made a stupendous recovery in the past two years. At the end of 2010, AQR had $33 billion in assets under management. Its funds’ performance was up nearly 20 percent last year, after being up 38 percent in 2009. This is all the more striking because many analysts believe the quants helped cause, or at least exacerbated, the meltdown by giving traders a false sense of security.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 29, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,191 words)

Rad Storm Rising

A hundred and fifty years ago the Russian philosopher Petr Chaadayev wrote that “we are one of those nations that somehow are not part of mankind but exist only for the sake of teaching the world some kind of terrible lesson.” In the area of nuclear affairs the steady emission of environmental horror stories from the USSR confirms that the Soviet Union is in the process of teaching the world another in its series of terrible lessons.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Dec 1, 1990
Length: 17 minutes (4,460 words)

North Korea’s Digital Underground

Their work is illegal and extremely dangerous, and it is producing results. In December 2009, for example, one reporter for the Daily NK, a Web site based in Seoul, embarrassed Pyongyang by intercepting a copy of Kim Jong Il’s annual message, a critical document that sets the ideological tone for the year, before it appeared in North Korea’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun. This past December, Open Radio North Korea, a broadcast-news organization, broke the story that a train headed for Pyongyang with gifts from China for Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent, was reportedly sabotaged and derailed, in one of several sporadic and mostly unreported acts of resistance that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,338 words)

Showdown in the Sunshine State

Two of Wall Street’s savviest value investors, Bruce Berkowitz and David Einhorn, pride themselves on their rigorous analysis. Now they’re locked in a scorched-earth dispute over the value of some Florida real estate. How could they look at the same facts and reach such wildly different conclusions, and what does that say about the “value” of value investing?

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Mar 8, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,256 words)

James L. Brooks on Journalism, the Oscars, and ‘Broadcast News’

“We filmed it almost entirely in sequence. We even broke up the newsroom scenes just so we could shoot the picture in sequence. And that means we kept informing ourselves. That means we woke up and these things happened with people in the sequence they’re supposed to happen. So that’s ‘process,’ as you say. But keep in mind—we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this movie if Holly [Hunter] hadn’t walked in. I also waited six months for William Hurt to become available. He almost didn’t do the picture. And I don’t think we’d be talking about ‘Broadcast News’ if I hadn’t waited those six months for him.”

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 26, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,497 words)

Mind vs. Machine

In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act “more human” than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn’t just changing how we live, it’s raising new questions about what it means to be human.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Feb 8, 2011
Length: 33 minutes (8,495 words)

‘Knifed’: Sargent Shriver and the 1968 VP Nomination

In the spring of 1968 Sargent Shriver—the founding director of the Peace Corps, the head of Johnson’s War on Poverty, and, as the husband of Eunice Kennedy, a brother-in-law of John, Robert, and Edward Kennedy—was appointed U.S. ambassador to France. His appointment was not without controversy in the upper reaches of the Democratic Party—and in his own extended family.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 1, 2004
Length: 16 minutes (4,022 words)