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Drinking in the park
We’ve been spending a month back in our old hometown of Berkeley, California. Of course, there are features that distinguish Berkeley from Oxford — the hills, the ocean, the redwoods and eucalyptus,...
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Reprobationist childrearing
This article about the differences between parental attitudes and obsessions in the US from those in other western nations (in this case, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and Spain) reminded me...
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The educational value of Nazi propaganda
Being in Berkeley right now, I think often about Mario Savio’s famous speech, now approaching its 50th anniversary. This passage, in particular, came to my mind in regard to recent events: Well I ask...
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Stephen Wolfram’s longitudinal fables
There’s lots of interesting plots on Stephen Wolfram’s analysis of Facebook data, but what jumps out to me is the way he feels compelled to turn his cross-sectional data — information about people’s...
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Why don’t we throw people out of emergency rooms?
In discussions of market forces in health care, someone always points out that we don’t allow people to just die in the streets. Anyone who shows up in an emergency room must be treated (in the US this...
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Hospital advertisements
How to choose your emergency room So, you’ve just been hit by a bus, and you’re lying bleeding in the gutter. Naturally, what you’re thinking about is, what would be the most convenient place to get a...
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Bake sales of the rich and famous
Via Rachel Larimore is this NY Post article about the struggle by headmasters of exclusive NY private schools to get wealthy parents to perform menial duties in person. Instead, many are sending...
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Not the Lake Wobegon Hospital
From the front page of the West County Times: Death rates at Bay Area hospitals vary widely, new report reveals While some hospitals excelled at keeping patients alive, more than half of institutions...
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Flyin’ kites in the rain: Reflections on American fairy tales
What’s the connection between Ben Franklin and Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly’s character in the 1952 film musical Singin’ in the Rain), aside from being the Americans most famous for felicitous activities...
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Moral panic panic: How much ridicule are the lives of 4500 children a year...
As though it need to defend its title as the world’s leading provider of smug, The New Republic has published a piece by NY Times religion reporter Mark Oppenheimer (MO hereafter) about how irrational...
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Renters are horrible, evil people, says the NY Times
In many parts of the US the financial crisis has led to more houses being rented rather than bought by the people who want to live in them, according to an article in today’s NY Times, titled “As...
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Wrangling the 8-ton UNIVAC
I was reading Ariel Levy’s New Yorker profile of Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the recent Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (and, by extension, of...
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Civil wars in US and British memory
I commented a while back on the NSA and GCHQ naming their most secret programs of spying on their fellow citizens after battles of their civil wars (American and English respectively). I didn’t remark...
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Cool nerds
An interesting article by Carl Wilson (apparently the start of a month-long series) in Slate looks at the word “cool” in its past and current incarnations. It’s a lot more readable and to the point...
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Compute the interest
Another comment based on Sharon Ann Murphy’s wonderful book on 19th century life insurance in the US: She describes an 1852 case in which the American Mutual Insurance Company tried to renege on a...
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American exceptionalism: Harassing tourists and others
A discussion broke out on The Dish about the high-handed and sometimes abusive treatment that foreigners entering the US are subjected to, even citizens of international peers, like the EU, compared...
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Demographic fallacies and classical music
I was just reading an article in Slate with the title “Classical Music in America is Dead”. The argument boils down to two points: Classical music listeners are a small portion of the population....
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The domestic elephant
I’ve long been bemused by the function of the elephant in the popular phrase “the elephant in the living room”. When it was invented by the recovery movement — I think in the 1980′s — it clearly was...
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The long arm of the gay mafia
I was amused by the intimations that cropped up in reports on Brendan Eich’s dismissal as CEO of Mozilla that he had been (in the words of one comedian) “whacked by the gay mafia”. Now, the “X mafia”...
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Porn suits
One of Roald Dahl’s final and most bitter stories (from the late 1980s) tells of a scam engineered by a rare book seller, who picks names out of the obituaries, and then sends a bill to the grieving...
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