They may not be far away. Components are getting better and cheaper. Research and investment is booming. “The robots that will really change things will perform multiple tasks. They won’t do everything right out of the box. They’ll come equipped with attachment points for new accessories and standard interfaces that allow new third-party software to add functions, much like apps on phones” (2,580 words)
Fine spat between Churchland, author of “Neurophilosophy”, and McGinn, who reviewed it . Churchland: “Nobody in neuroscience needs McGinn to tell us that structural correlates of a function do not ipso facto explain that function. His sermonizing is just so much spit in the wind.” McGinn: “It is possible to discern some points beneath the rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right” (1,360 words)
Interview with Gordon Wills, cinematographer who worked with Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. “There was never a dull moment with Francis. They also used too much dynamite in the car when we blew up Apollonia. It put a crack down the side of the villa. It was never a good idea to turn your back and miss what was being said. Francis tended to make a different movie with whoever he was talking to” (2,910 words)
On the political history of gun rights in America. “Many are startled to learn that the US Supreme Court didn’t rule that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual’s right to own a gun until 2008, when District of Columbia v. Heller struck down the capital’s law effectively banning handguns in the home”. The change had little to do with legal scholarship, and everything to do with political lobbying (3,680 words)
Hard discounters crack Britain’s class code. Aldi and Lidl are “deliberately catering to middle-class tastes”. Poundland “boasts that a quarter of its shoppers are from the AB social group. Its most profitable stores are located in wealthier towns, such as Cambridge, Stratford-upon-Avon, Guildford and Bath”. Brand-name manufacturers supply products in £1 sizes. Irony may play a part. “It’s cool to be cheap” (2,520 words)
On the costs and benefits of staying thin. “There are a number of euphemisms for female thinness that do not require a man to make the impolite admission of his exclusive attraction to women with very little body fat. Though ‘active’ and ‘full of energy’ make respectable showings, they are a distance second and third from ‘a woman who takes care of herself’. When he says ‘herself’, he means, ‘her body’” (2,175 words)
Exercises in data visualisation using results from 675,000 chess tournament games dating back to the 15th century. Elo ratings reliably predict which player will win: “I’d imagine the only reason this trend levels out at ~90% is because this data set contains games where a talented new player hasn’t quite reached their proper Elo rating yet”. Playing white confers a strong advantage to an expert, less so to a rookie (1,110 words)
Review of Michael Lewis’s “Flash Boys”, about high-frequency trading, which has made stock markets “secret and mysterious” to outsiders. “The principle on which much market legislation rests is that it’s illegal to trade on the basis of information that is not publicly available. The fact that the apparent price is not the actual price: does that fit the legal definition of non-public information? I’d have thought it does” (4,000 words)
Machine intelligence will disrupt law firms as fundamentally as the internet did newspapers. For discovery, machines can sift through any amount of documents finding patterns without fatigue; they can rank precedents using network analysis; they can manage automated forms and simple briefs; and they don’t rely on hunches, they can crunch the data before advising a client whether to bring a case (3,870 words)
Discussion of recent books on the 1989 Tiananmen massacre and its legacy by Louisa Lim and Rowena Xiaoqing He. “June 4 was a watershed in contemporary Chinese history, a turning point that ended the idealism and experimentation of the 1980s, and led to the hypercapitalist and hypersensitive China of today”. The Communist Party found political repression and economic liberalisation to be a winning formula (3,906 words)
Notes from the life of a tuba player. “Orchestral excerpts are short — an average of 30 seconds — and, as the name implies, they are passages from symphonies. They are the basis of auditions for the holy grail of tuba jobs: principal tubist in an orchestra, a position which, if you make it at the highest level, means a performance career with a six-figure salary. It doesn’t get any better than that for the tuba” (1,600 words)
Network effects operate in espionage, and thus in politics, much as they operate in other information economies. “If you have a choice of joining a big spy network like America’s or a small one like Russia’s then it’s like choosing whether to write software for the PC or the Mac back in the 1990s. The economics can often be stronger than the ideology.” Academic paper; accessible; interesting throughout (PDF) (10,250 words)
From the archives. Tremendous essay on Richard Drew’s 9/11 photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Centre. “There is something almost rebellious in the man’s posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it. He is in the clutches of pure physics. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears” (7,263 words)
If your dictionary makes for pedestrian reading, take a tip from the great New Yorker stylist John McPhee, and switch to an early Webster’s, up to and including the 1913 edition. Noah Webster’s learning shines through; the pages are rich in Milton and Shakespeare. “To glisten, or glister, is to shine with a soft and fitful luster, as eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew”. Beat that for a definition (3,280 words)
The story has been told before, in the measured tones of the BBC; but here it is in the harsher register of the New York Post, and the added raw detail makes it well worth a second pass. An American anthropologist fathers a son with a teenage Amazonian tribal woman, leaving grief and disruption in his wake; the mother tries and fails to adapt to America; years later, the son moves to join her in the jungle (2,300 words)
Deep dive into why New York’s bike-rental scheme is wobbling badly. Much useful wisdom about public-private partnerships. Basic problem: the private operator is incompetent, but can’t be dislodged, because there isn’t an alternative. The renting formalities are so complex that they repel casual users who are meant to provide the profits. The “Citibike” branding has been so successful that no secondary sponsors can be found (2,240 words)
The Soviet collapse 25 years ago freed the Baltic states and the communist satellites of eastern Europe to prosper. Elsewhere the legacy is mixed. “In at least half of the countries of the former USSR a new dictatorship replaced the old, often with the same cast of oppressors. The vast majority of the ex-Soviet population finds itself under authoritarian rule at a standard of living well below the level of 1990″ (1,255 words)
A father tells of his son’s search for employment. “What is Jamie capable of doing for a living? Our first checklist filled us with despair: factory work, nope; food service, nope (not fast enough); hotel maid service, nope; machine and auto repair, nope. At the supermarket he had trouble with the U-boat, the device that carts dozens of boxes out into the aisles — and besides, they were only hiring graveyard shift” (3,370 words)
The sun gives us days. The moon gives us months. The earth gives us years. But where did the week come from? Seemingly from Babylon, where they started to slice the lunar month into four. It passed into Jewish culture and thus into Christian culture. But the Romans managed perfectly well without weeks — and so might we, if we want to experiment with more flexible and perhaps more efficient ways of living (1,780 words)
If you read all the way though Schumpeter’s classic text, instead of just the first few pages about creative destruction, you discover he’s smarter than the caricature in most ways, but very wrong in others. He anticipates Christensen and Taleb in seeing that the real threat to any given business is not competition, but disruption; monopolies are rarely sustainable. He also thinks, however, that capitalism is doomed (1,400 words)
Profile of the novelist as “monster of snobbery”, recovering drug addict, “sorrowful egomaniac” and survivor of an extraordinary life combining inheritance, abuse, hedonism, eventual literary success. Koestler and Ayer were family friends; the Duc de Talleyrand a step-grandparent. St Aubyn has “the unhurried accent of English privilege that is part of his inheritance from a father who tortured him” (12,500 words)
The “strange and brilliant” writer Rosemary Tonks disappeared in the 1970s after publishing several novels and two slim volumes of poetry, “Notes on Cafes and Bedrooms” (1963) and “Iliad of Broken Sentences” (1967). She was “the finest poet of London life since Eliot”. Following her death last month, more is being learned about her later life. She went blind, found religion, and moved to Bournemouth (2,730 words)
Arguments for reparations inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s recent essay exaggerate white gains from slavery. “Most living white Americans would be wealthier had this nation not enslaved African-Americans and thus most whites have lost from slavery too, albeit much less than blacks have lost”. Please note: this not meant as an argument against the moral case for reparations, regardless of the outcome for whites (746 words)
The results of the European Parliament elections signal a new act in the euro drama. The European Central Bank has just about held the eurozone together so far; but politics may now tear it apart, as peripheral countries tire of paying for Germany’s trade surplus through their own high employment, and radical parties increase their power. Here, a scenario of how the political reaction might play out in Spain (4,150 words)
You have 3 of your 5 free click-throughs remaining. Why not become a member, for just $1/month? You get unlimited browsing, plus direct saving of articles to Instapaper and Readability for reading later.
Already a subscriber? Log in here
You have used up your allowance of 5 free click-throughs. So why not become a member, for just $1.60/month? You get unlimited browsing, plus direct saving of articles to Instapaper and Readability for reading later.
Already a subscriber? Log in here
You have no free click throughs remaining.
To be able to click through directly to articles, as well as send them directly to Readability, Pocket and Instapaper, become a subscriber.
Already a subscriber? Log in here
You have one of your 5 free click-throughs remaining.
So why not become a member for just $1.60/month? You get unlimited browsing, plus direct saving of articles to Instapaper, Pocket and Readability for reading later.
Already a subscriber? Log in here
If you are a member, please enter your email for unlimited browsing.
If you are not yet a member, please enjoy limited access, or
SubscribePlease enter your email
Cancel
