From the category archives:

Linkblog

A selection of my published work since 2001 is available here. Contact me with any specific requests.

Culture

Why do people still need to celebrate the web?

And why, in our modern media culture that thrives on contrarianism, is there not substantial scepticism about the web – not the slightest suggestion that

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Culture

How Celebrities Stay Famous (Regardless of Talent)

What is less clear is how people, ideas and practices become prominent in the first place, Schaller says. In baseball, performance is likely to provide

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Culture

Rebranding Africa

This is a country whose music of choice is jazz; a country that long ago invented a genre called highlife that spread across Africa —

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Culture

Robert Wright, A Secularist “Bullish About Monotheism”

In sharp contrast to many contemporary secularists, Wright is bullish about monotheism. In “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny” (2000), he argued that there is

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Culture

It’s Time to Create Your Own Economy

More and more, “production” — that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations — has become interior to the human mind rather than

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Culture

‘The Whole Five Feet – What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else’

[H]e approaches the classics without the apocalyptic vision of a culture warrior or the sort of popularizing sentiment that glibly reduces Aristotle to a self-help

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Culture

Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love

In her view, we have domesticated love past all recognition, turning what is rightly leonine, destructive, and majestic into a yawning, chubby house cat. Hers

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Linkblog

Data Center Overload

It seemed heretical to think of Karl Marx. But looking at the roomful of computers running automated trading models that themselves scan custom-formatted machine-readable financial

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