Will Singapore Allow Disruptive Art?
From The Daily Beast Singapore is so dedicated to tidiness that chewing gum is forbidden, or so goes an old cliché that, as it happens, is also a fact. The city-state also has strict rules about carrying open durians, the fruits loved by locals for their nauseous stink. Even the tiny food stalls in Singapore’s [...]
Revising how the US calculates GDP will not have a happy ending
From The Guardian Hollywood creates fairytales on movie screens. Now it’s going to help create fairytales about America’s economic growth. For the first time, the US is changing the way it measures its economic growth, the measure we call our gross domestic product. Starting in July, the keepers of US economic data at the Bureau [...]
Will Singapore Allow Disruptive Art?
From The Daily Beast Singapore is so dedicated to tidiness that chewing gum is forbidden, or so goes an old cliché that, as it happens, is also a fact. The city-state also has strict rules about carrying open durians, the fruits loved by locals for their nauseous stink. Even the tiny food stalls in Singapore’s [...]
Maker’s Mark Isn’t What it Used to Be
From The Daily Beast Maker’s Mark is watering down the whiskey. Zachary Seward reports that they are lowering the alcohol content very slightly, by about 3%. (Unclear whether that’s 3% of the current alcohol by volume, or 3% points). According to the executives at Maker’s Mark, you can’t taste the difference. Maker’s Mark cites strong [...]
Washington Should Use CEOs as Mediators to Resolve Debt Debate
From The Daily Beast I am the CEO of TiVo, one of the original participants in the Fix the Debt Campaign, and I voted for President Obama for reelection. But it’s clear to me that partisans on both sides are misinterpreting the current political dynamics surrounding deficits and the possibility and logic of compromise in [...]
Don’t Cheap Out, Big Biz!
From The Daily Beast The State of the Union did contain one surprise. President Obama’s call for an increase in the minimum wage from its present level of $7.25 per hour to $9 per hour was not among the proposals leaked to the press in advance of the speech. Republicans predictably rejected the call. But [...]
Marco Rubio’s Water-Bottle Moment
From The New Yorker By the second minute of Marco Rubio’s official Republican response to the President’s State of the Union address last night, it was clear that the Senator’s body was betraying him. His lips caught each other in the way they do at moments of stress, when we are suddenly confronted, after long [...]
Looking For Someone
From The New Yorker In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest, a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out [...]
The American Story Behind Gangs and Gun Violence
From The Atlantic Like everyone, we at The Atlantic have spent the weeks since Newtown thinking about the role of guns in America. In our ongoing effort to broaden the conversation, I spent some time talking to Professor Harold Pollack, who co-directs the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago. Pollack is one of the [...]
The Video-Game Industry Needs to Defend Itself—Here’s How
From The Atlantic In the wake of the recent mass killings, one thing is clear: Change is necessary from politicians, the press, and even the video-game industry—just not the change most people think. Ferocious new, evidence-free attacks on the video-game industry remind us how much politicians and the press can wildly overreact. But even though [...]
Why Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ Is the Greatest Relationship Album Ever
From The Atlantic For better or worse, we live in a culture where lifelong, monogamous commitments are widely held to be the desired ends of romantic life: Romantic comedies end in weddings, and Hallmark doesn’t make Valentine’s Day cards for open relationships. For those who buy into this norm, the downside is that in our [...]
