Earlier this week Mother Jones published a fascinating sampling from the CIA’s psychological profiles of various international figures. In 1943, the Office of Strategic Services (the WWII-era CIA predecessor) tasked a Harvard psychologist with drafting a profile of Hitler’s personality. Below is an excerpt, as compiled by Dave Gilson of Mother Jones: There is little disagreement among professional, or even among […]
nonfiction
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The City Opens Up At Night: How LA’s Underground Bike Scene Took Off
For the original eight, the fountain tour was something of an epiphany. As the Mommas and Papas explored downtown, they realized something: At night, the city opened up to them. They suddenly had free rein on the roads, the freedom to discover L.A. on their own terms. They could pass through the richest and poorest neighborhoods in a single evening.
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E.M. Forster on the Novel and Why Aristotle Was Wrong About Character
The specialty of the novel is that the writer can talk about his characters as well as through them or can arrange for us to listen when they talk to themselves. He has access to self-communings, and from that level he can descend even deeper and peer into the subconscious.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
The Art and Science of Failure
We are excited to share a reading (and watching!) list on science and failure from guest contributor Louise Lief. In 2014 Louise Lief began the Science and the Media project, an initiative that explores how science relates to our everyday lives. She is the former deputy director of the International Reporting Project.
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What de Blasio and Uruguay’s José Mujica Have In Common
I showed the group a Guardian article calling [Uruguay’s President] Mujica “the world’s most radical president.” They burst into contemptuous groans. Last January, Bill de Blasio took over as mayor of New York City. The election was a landslide; the hopes invested in him near messianic. “When New York City Democrats head to the polls […]
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What Would a More Efficient Clinical Trial System Look Like?
What might a more-efficient trial system look like? One collaboration in Chicago offers a possible way forward. Working together, several of the city’s academic medical centers have established a joint network for conducting clinical trials. Participating institutions now routinely interview all of their hospitalized patients, regardless of diagnosis, to keep detailed records on their health […]
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The Invisible Hand: Who Was Adam Smith?
In a recent essay for Adbusters, Douglas Haddow posited that algorithms are the new “invisible hand” guiding our capitalist system. But before Haddow got to that conclusion, he explored the original idea of the invisible hand, and the man behind the phrase: If we want to interrogate the true nature of these numbers, the wizard […]
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Using the British Railway Mania of the 1840s to Explain the Beanie Baby Craze
Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and […]
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How a $1B E-Commerce Site Found Its Market on a Trip to Babies “R” Us
They had a small inkling of what they wanted to do. At the time, flash-sale startups like Gilt were just beginning to make some noise, and Cavens and Vadon seriously considered aping the model for the home and beauty space (a la One Kings Lane) before scrapping the idea. “What we came to realize in […]
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Jenny Holzer on the Difficulties of Being a Successful Female Artist
I would describe [my career] as a slow incline with various dips rather than a steep trajectory, but I was relatively young when I did a show at DIA, then the Guggenheim, and represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. During that time, I also had a baby. Those three shows all took place within a few years, […]