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nytimesAmericans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not.
U.S. unemployment is down and jobs are going unfilled. But for people without much education, the real question is: Do those jobs pay enough to live on?
NYTimesSemicolons: A Love Story
How Kurt Vonnegut taught one writer to hate the semicolon; how William James convinced him to love it.
NYTimesMaybe Your Sleep Problem Isn’t a Problem
The conventional wisdom is that morning people are high achievers, go-getters, while late risers are lazy. But what if going to bed in the wee hours is actually an advantage?
nytimesYes, the Octopus Is Smart as Heck. But Why?
It has eight arms, three hearts — and a plan. Scientists aren’t sure how the cephalopods got to be so intelligent.
NYTIMESUmberto Eco: Exploring Imaginary Lands With One of Italy’s Masters of Fiction
The Italian novelist and thinker has published a coffee table book about legendary (but nonexistent) lands.
NYTIMESThe Libertarian Fantasy
Phosphorus and Freedom. Free markets can’t solve all our problems. Just ask Toledo.
NYTimesThe Superfund Sites of Silicon Valley
Inside these plain vanilla buildings, where C.E.O.s in hoodies and jeans stockpile more money than the G.D.P. of developing countries, newly minted techies complain that “S.V.,” the world’s largest wealth generator, is too expensive and that its exhausting work culture is toxic. So, too, is the land beneath their feet.
NYTimesCan Crows Make Mental Pictures of Tools?
New Caledonian crows were trained to seek rewards by tearing paper of a certain size, demonstrating what researchers say is quite advanced toolmaking.
NYTIMES‘Wilde in America,’ by David M. Friedman
A cultural historian argues that Oscar Wilde was among the first to realize that celebrity could come before accomplishment.
NYTimesArchaeologists in China Discover the Oldest Stone Tools Outside Africa
Chipped rocks found in western China indicate that human ancestors ventured from Africa earlier than previously believed.
NYTIMESCrows May Learn Lessons From Death
A new study suggests the birds pay careful attention to their dead as a way to gather information about threats.
NYTIMESGeoff Dyer’s ‘Zona’ Examines the Film ‘Stalker’
Geoff Dyer on the Soviet-era cinematic masterpiece.
NYTIMESTo Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and Now
To Understand Rising Inequality, Consider the Janitors at Two Top Companies, Then and NowFocusing on core competence and outsourcing the rest has made U.S.…
NYTIMESGala Dalí’s Life Wasn’t Quite Surreal, but It Was Pretty Strange
Salvador Dalí‘s “Gala Placidia. Galatea of the Spheres” from 1952, for which his wife, Gala Dalí, was the model and muse. A new exhibition in Barcelona examines Gala as someone willing to play those roles, but also as a person eager to forge her own path as an artist.
NYTIMESWhich Language Uses the Most Sounds?
Taa, spoken by a few thousand people in Botswana and Namibia, is believed to have the largest sound inventory of any language in the world.
NYTIMESRaskolnikov Says the Darndest Things
Dostoyevsky's “Crime and Punishment” changed my life. It strengthened my resolve to be a writer and inspired me to learn Russian so I could read the novel in the original. But I never did. It had all stayed too fresh in memory. Finally, some 30 years later, in order to review these two new translations, I read it in Russian and was back in that world of dark staircases and ax murders. Of course, the original read at the age of 50 could never shake you like a translation read at 20.
NYTimesWhat Good Is ‘Community’ When Someone Else Makes All the Rules?
You can tell a lot about the cultural status of capitalism by how we refer to people who buy stuff. “Customer,” with its implicit deference — its suggestion that the buyer is always right — is now a relic of a bygone era. “Client” is formal and reserved for professional relationships. “Consumer,” with its air of piggish, Pac-Man voracity, is the slightly dehumanizing moniker most of us grew up with, but that was some time ago, before the rise of the brand as a cultic family. Now everyone who buys or uses or even just cares about a product or service has been collectively upgraded to something more ephemeral, almost spiritual, a loose association of souls brought together in one churchlike congregation: a “community.”
NYTIMESDark Clouds Over the Internet
Governments have legitimate reasons to seek user data beyond their territorial reach, and privacy advocates ignore that need at their peril.
NYTIMESHunting for the Origins of Symbolic Thought
Archaeologists are discovering Paleolithic art outside Europe, rewriting the history of human creativity.
NYTIMES‘The Story of Ain’t,’
“A lot had happened to English since the early ’30s, including a world war and most of the New Deal. Also television, the civil rights movement, superhighways, Dr. Spock, rock ’n’ roll, the Bomb, rocket science, the cold war, Superman and the Kinsey reports. New words — and new meanings of old ones— were everywhere, like 'astronaut,' 'beatnik,' 'den mother' and 'satellite.' Into Webster’s Third they went.” Webster’s Third New International was scorned for being less judgmental than its predecessor.
NYTIMESMaria Popova Has Some Big Ideas
Maria Popova is the mastermind of Brain Pickings, one of the faster growing literary empires on the Internet, yet she is virtually unknown.
NYTIMESWriting Rules! Advice From The Times on Writing Well
Recent Times features, including a new series on the art of writing, inspire us to create this list of 10 rules for writing well. In it you'll find links to advice on everything from using punctuation to reading the…
NYTimesEyeing Pornography That Uses the Holocaust as Titillation
In early-1960s Israel pornographic, possibly anti-Semitic novels that detailed sensational tales of the torture and rape of male concentration camp prisoners by curvaceous female Nazi guards rapidly rose from marginal pulp reading to mass-market popularity.
NYTIMESThe Lonely Death of George Bell
Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, some alone and unseen. Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of activity. Sometimes, along the way, a life’s secrets are revealed. // This might not always be a good way to live (that is, in solitude), but according to Buddhist teachings, it can be a good way to die. We die alone anyway, and dying without other people's laying their trips around us might help us stay focused in a moment when most people can't really help, but can possibly annoy.
NYTIMESSchottenfreude
The German’s language’s ability to express the inexpressible explains why so many words have been embraced into English.
NYTimesThe Blindness of Social Wealth
I summarize all this because loneliness and social isolation are the problem that undergird many of our other problems. More and more Americans are socially poor. And yet it is very hard for the socially wealthy to even see this fact. It is the very nature of loneliness and social isolation to be invisible. We talk as if the lonely don’t exist.
NYTimesThe Way Middle-Aged White Men Work Now
Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20.
NYTIMESThe Americanization of Mental Illness
"For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."
NYTimesThe Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar
Two decades ago, a renowned professor promised to produce a flawless version of one of the 20th century’s most celebrated novels: “Ulysses.” Then he disappeared.
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