Moving Stationery

In March 2010, Barry Duncan, master palindromist, was locked in an epic struggle with the alphabet. He was totally absorbed in the completion of a commissioned piece. “It’s draining me of every bit of energy I have,” he explained at the time. He’d been working on it for as many as twelve hours a day. Then, on April 6, after an estimated two hundred hours of toil, Barry Duncan unleashed on this world the greatest palindrome of his life. “Far and away the best reversible work I’ve ever, ever done,” he calls it.

You know palindromes—words or phrases that read the same forward or backward. “Party booby trap.” “Lisa Bonet ate no basil.” And, famously, “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” When you think about palindromes, you probably just think they’re fun.

For Duncan, though, they’re much more than that. He writes them constantly. He sees them everywhere. Have you ever killed twenty dull minutes scanning the grid of a word-search puzzle, and then afterward found yourself with a bit of a word-search hangover, your eyes involuntarily searching for words everywhere? Imagine doing the word search for three decades. That’s Barry Duncan with palindromes.

And ladies: he’s single. ;)

According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, Iraq and Afghanistan were perhaps the first two wars in history paid for entirely on credit. We are now only beginning to feel the consequences.

In 1994, Brandon Maxfield was paralysed by a stray bullet from a faulty gun. He was to receive $24 million in compensation, except the gun company filed for bankruptcy. Then Brandon had a genius idea: go to the bankruptcy auction and buy up all the assets.

Because if you can’t beat them, own them.

George Steiner wrote that an intellectual is someone who can’t read a book without a pencil in their hands. This is a piece on what we do to books.

(My Jasper Fforde books used to have fake age marks all over them - cracks and bends printed into the cover. I’m a bit proud to say you can’t make out the fake ones anymore.)

During the Enlightenment, conversation was held to be the engine of reform. Today, it mainly happens through chat windows.

How do webcams affect the way we talk to other people? How does Google Chat change the way we connect to old friends?

LIKE CORRUPTION, crime, and asbestos, “inflation” is a word that many Americans imagine in all-red capital letters, flashing across TV screens amid warnings of crisis. The word is shorthand for an economy that has spiraled out of control. “Inflation is as violent as a mugger and as deadly as a hit man,” said Ronald Reagan in 1978, as nervous citizens imagined the day when they’d have to push a wheelbarrow full of cash to the grocery store in order to buy a loaf of bread.

That particular nightmare never came to pass, thanks to drastic measures taken by the Federal Reserve. For the better part of the past 30 years, the dollar has stayed stable, with the central bank standing guard over the economy and doing everything necessary to keep inflation low.

You might say that Kenneth Rogoff has been one of the guards. His reputation as a conservative-minded inflation hawk followed him from the Fed to the International Monetary Fund to his current position in the economics department at Harvard.

But then came the financial crisis of 2008, and the ensuing slump. And as the economy has continued to stagnate, Rogoff, 58, has become the flag-bearer for an unlikely position: that as we struggle to help the economy find its way out of the darkness, inflation could be the answer. It’s time, Rogoff says, to put Reagan’s “hit man” to work for the good guys.

As an article, this is Economics for dummies. But that’s not a bad thing.

The basic idea is that since America is freezing to death, we may as well try lighting the house on fire before things get worse. And if they’re clever enough about the fire, they might be able to put it out, as well.

The stock market is imploding, Europe is on the brink, and, if the doomsayers are to be believed, we could be headed for a double-dip recession.

None of that worries Irving Kahn, perhaps the world’s oldest working investment banker. “There are a lot of opportunities out there, and one shouldn’t complain,” says Kahn. At 105, he might well be the last man on earth who can speak authoritatively on both longevity and making money amid a historic market meltdown. In 1928, at the age of 23, he went to work on Wall Street as a stock analyst and brokerage clerk. By the tail end of the Great Depression, in 1939, he’d made enough money in the market to move his wife and two children out of public housing and into their own house in the suburbs.

Kahn is still in the game, waking every morning at 7 and going to work as chairman of Kahn Brothers, the small family investment firm he founded in 1978. Until a few years ago, he took the bus or walked the 20 blocks from his Upper East Side home to his midtown office. “For a 105-year-old guy, it’s pretty remarkable,” says Thomas Kahn, Irving’s 68-year-old son and the company’s president. “I get tired just thinking about it.”

The illusion of asymmetric insight makes it seem as though you know everyone else far better than they know you, and not only that, but you know them better than they know themselves. You believe the same thing about groups of which you are a member. As a whole, your group understands outsiders better than outsiders understand your group, and you understand the group better than its members know the group to which they belong.

A meandering examination of why you aren’t as smart as you believe, by David McRaney, the reigning king of ego-deflating psychology articles.

(Source: therealbbyron)

When you are married to a man who can make or break humans and entire nations, you have an obligation beyond the marriage – and perhaps the means, too, to stop his excesses. If you choose to stand by a dishonourable man, you must then share the blame, the punishment and public opprobrium. There must be a special tribunal in hell for such intimate collusion.

An attack on the wives of dictators.

I don’t buy it. Maybe the wife of an evil, powerful man isn’t in it for the diamond necklaces?

Maybe she’s in love?

We may not have the technology to read each other’s minds any time soon, but thanks to researchers at MIT, we may have goggles we can use to read each other’s faces.

It turns out that the average non-autistic individual’s ability to read facial cues is only about 54%. Even something as inaccurate as visual recognition software gets 64%. And the potential this has for autistic users is phenomenal. Especially since the ability to read the cues sticks with you after you take the glasses off.

Remarkable.

I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable, nor, I think, desirable. Someday, I hope she enjoys a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If my daughter drinks alcohol as an adult, as she probably will, I will encourage her to do it safely. If she chooses to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation. Tobacco should be shunned, of course, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer her away from it. Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.

Sam Harris on the value of psychedelics as a part of the human experience. He gets a little nutty in the middle where he talks about the ‘untapped potential of the human mind’ but other than that it is a lucid and engaging defense of mind-altering substance-use.

An examination of queer-friendly sex columnist Dan Savage’s nonmonogamy teachings, including his firm belief that flings don’t necessarily doom relationships.

I don’t really get the issue. When you boil it down, all he’s saying is that couples should be open and honest and trusting with each other.

I mean, jeez. What a scandal. Please, someone, ring the Pope.

An examination of the field of male movie stars.

• It defines a movie star as someone who makes us want to watch a movie just because they’re that actor is in it.
• It points out that Will Smith’s resume over the last ten years could have been spat out by a computer.
• It makes the point that Ryan Reynolds is not a movie star.

Throughout, it’s cynical, amusing, and world-weary. Quite worth the read.

It’s senseless, at least in the absence of divine agency, to declare that any two people were made for each other, yet we say it all the time, to sustain our belief that it’s sensible for them to pair up. The conceit can turn the search for someone into a search for that someone, which is fated to end in futility or compromise, whether conducted on the Internet or in a ballroom. And yet people find each other, every which way, and often achieve something that they call happiness.

The thing I love about the New Yorker is that it allows and encourages its contributors to be excellent. The thing I don’t love is the length of the excellence.

I’d call this an article on Internet dating, but to be accurate I’d call it an essay, bordering on treatise.

But it is truly one of the best pieces I’ve read in a long time. And the two casual, distracted hours it took me to read this were well spent. It’s worded well, it’s structured well, and it’s insightful.

Jonathan Holmes on “Go Back To Where You Came From.”

Pretty excellent.

(Source: smashedbear)