I just finished listening to the best and clearest explanation I’ve heard yet of what caused the financial crisis, from This American Life. Check it out. I’m fairly sure that I still don’t understand all the fundamentals here, but I think I know enough to come to some actual conclusions: This is real. The problems [...]
If there’s any silver lining to the outrageous FISA bill that the Democrats rammed through congress today, it’s this: we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the government doesn’t give a shit about our privacy. That doesn’t go for everyone in government, of course1, but the don’t-give-a-shit contingent is almost always larger [...]
One of the reasons I find the Adam and Eve myth so odious is the role to which it implicitly consigns women: second-fiddle organisms made out of the master sex’s cast-off rib parts. That’s one interpretation, anyway — but, given the way that women are treated in the rest of the Bible, it’s almost certainly [...]
More bad news on the iPhone front today. Lord Jobs unveiled the latest iteration yesterday, faster and thinner and, if possible, even purdier than before. It remains one of the loveliest consumer devices ever to grace our narrow visual spectrum, but its unholy coupling with AT&T has just become more bindingly unholy. They now require [...]
When I first started working in DC, one of the first things I noticed was how nasty your average Starbucks customer is down here. You see it over and over again: the guy who stands in line oozing impatience, ostentatiously checking his watch, sighing loudly, staring daggers at helpless barristas. I was saddened by it. [...]
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck. My hard drive just crashed. But not just crashed. Crashed and took two weeks of data with it. Including my taxes (unsent, of course) and a story I was actually managing to make some progress on, a rare thing in these fallow post-Clarion days. And the killer is, I [...]
I went to the Apple Store this morning to see if they could fix my damaged iPhone, and was rebuffed — but not for the reasons I expected. So I got home, brooded a bit, then wrote a letter to Steve Jobs, bitching about the whole experience. Which is mildly ridiculous, of course. In the [...]
Fascist! is a word that gets thrown around a lot by abstractly angry people who don’t like what their governments are doing. But sometimes those people don’t really know what “fascist” means. People like me, for example. The word has a viscerally ugly ring to it, and suggests all sorts of nonspecific nastiness, and it’s [...]
For the love of god can someone please invent a gender-neutral singular pronoun? I’m trying to write a technical spec, and find myself fleeing again and again to the plural, because I’d otherwise have to fall back on “he” — or, worse, “he or she” — whenever I mention a user. The latter construction is [...]
Last.fm, a “social music” site, has started streaming full tracks, from thousands of artists, for free. I’m listening to Springsteen’s new album right now. So happy. Incidentally … is it me, or is “social” the new “i”? For a while there, back in the mid-late 90s, every other mildly internet-related product had a little “e” [...]
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