First Derivative [39]
variant perspectives
Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm not sure why, but I watched for a second time the Academy Award-winning film Spotlight, about how the Boston Globe broke the priest sex abuse story wide open in 2002. It was even better than I remembered it. One aspect of the movie stood out in…
76ers GM, president Sam Hinkie steps down
Philadelphia 76ers general manager and president of operations Sam Hinkie has stepped down in both roles, the team announced Wednesday. ESPN’s Marc Stein first reported the news.
From an analytical perspective, Sam Hinkie's resignation letter was a pure delight to read. It reads more like a great hedge fund investor letter than a GM resignation. So clear and interdisciplinary. A+—TK
Joseph Heath: How to beat racism
Consider the eternal problem of race in America. This is an area where liberals have expended a huge amount of energy, insisting that people adopt a more rational basis for their evaluation of individuals. And yet it is hardly an exaggeration to…
'There is good reason to think that these forms of group identification simply crowd out the other ones based on race. This can be far more effective than asking people to subscribe to some universalist ideal.'
This is my favorite street art in the world. It adorns a rail bridge that soars above I-45 in Houston. More than 300,000 cars pass by it every day. It has been modified a couple times by other street artists, but every time it goes back. It's a…
'There is nothing wrong with wanting to Be Someone in the external sense. But it is perilous.'
A recent episode of the dystopian television series “Black Mirror” begins with a soldier hunting down and killing hideous humanoids called roaches. It's a standard science-fiction scenario, man against monster, but there's a twist: it…
'There has always been something optimistic about the idea that our worst acts of inhumanity are based on confusion.'
(Excerpts from Skin in the Game) Sontag is about Sontag — Virtue is precisely what you don't show I will always remember my encounter with the writer and cultural icon Susan Sontag, largely because it was on the same day that I…
'It is immoral to be in opposition of the market system and not live (like the Unabomber) in a hut isolated from it.'
In the longstanding liberal narrative about Bill Clinton and his scandals, the one pushed by Clinton courtiers and ratified in media coverage of his post-presidency, our 42nd president was only guilty of being a horndog, his affairs were nobody's…
'But the Clinton operation was also extraordinarily sordid, in ways that should be thrown into particular relief by the absence of similar scandals in the Obama administration'
Mark Halperin Poisoned Our Politics
In mid-2005 I packed two duffel bags and took a train to Washington, where I hoped, as a young reporter, to better understand the city, and our politics and our country. As much as it was anyone’s, Washington was my city. I grew up there…
'Politics, in fact, is not hard to understand. That’s how anybody who cares about democracy, like Lincoln, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, would endeavor to present it.'
100 Years. 100 Million Lives. Think Twice.
In 1988, my twenty-six-year-old father jumped off a train in the middle of Hungary with nothing but the clothes on his back. For the next two years, he fled an oppressive Romanian Communist regime that would kill him if they ever laid hands on him…
'After spending four years... with Marxist memes... my classmates will graduate with the impression that communism represents a light-hearted critique of the status quo, rather than an empirically violent philosophy that destroyed millions of lives.'
Choosy Eggs May Pick Sperm for Their Genes, Defying Mendel's Law
The oldest law of genetics says that gametes combine randomly, but experiments hint that sometimes eggs select sperm actively for their genetic assets. In the winner-takes-all game of fertilization, millions of sperm race toward the egg that's…
h/t GJB—TK