Events

Economic historian Louis Hyman describes how the choices people in government and business make actually lead technological change, for some pretty obvious reasons: The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes. This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and...

The weather today inclined me to spend a lot of time outside in my neighborhood, except for the part that I had to spend inside working on the new Apollo Chorus website. (We're launching this week!) Regular posting will probably resume tomorrow.

The Post has a long-form profile of our greatest (and longest-serving!) former president, Jimmy Carter: When Carter left the White House after one tumultuous term, trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, he returned to Plains, a speck of peanut and cotton farmland that to this day has a nearly 40 percent poverty rate. The Democratic former president decided not to join corporate boards or give speeches for big money because, he says, he didn’t want to “capitalize financially on being in the...

Of course I'm going to blog about these three articles. First, former George W. Bush speechwriter and lifelong Republican Michael Gerson looks at the culture of celebrity that surrounds the President and says "our republic will never be the same:" The founders generally believed that the survival and success of a republic required leaders and citizens with certain virtues: moderation, self-restraint and concern for the common good. They were convinced that respect for a moral order made ordered liberty...

Jennifer Rubin believes she's found President Trump's stupidest Tweet ever: President Trump has issued shameful tweets, offensive tweets and self-serving tweets. Rarely, however, has he sent out a tweet that better conveys his abject ignorance about the country and economics than the tweet he posted Wednesday: Our Country was built on Tariffs, and Tariffs are now leading us to great new Trade Deals - as opposed to the horrible and unfair Trade Deals that I inherited as your President. Other Countries...

Eddie Lampert's hedge fund, ESL, is making a bid to buy the only remaining viable piece of Sears from, well, ESL: ESL’s proposal valued Kenmore at $400 million, excluding the impact of cash or debt, according to a letter from ESL to a Sears board committee that was filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A separate proposal valued the Sears Home Services division’s home improvement business at $70 million, with a potential extra $10 million if the company met certain financial...

In the geocentric model of how things work, it's really easy for you to fall directly toward Earth. This happens because you are already moving fast enough to have a very small delta vee with the surface at any particular moment. Not so falling into the sun, which is so hard, we only just launched the first probe that can do it on purpose: The reason has to do with orbital mechanics, the study of how natural forces influence the motions of rockets, satellites, and other space-bound technology. Falling...

Four articles I read late in the day and wanted to spike here: Greg Sargent looks at the polling data and concludes that President Trump's lies really aren't working. The lies his organization told about Chicago's Trump Tower and its violations of environmental laws aren't working either. Environmental damage will also be a big factor in the upcoming U.S. Senate race in Florida. And finally, physics isn't working—at least not according to the leading hypothesis of how it should work at quantum scale....

I'm re-reading DeMarco & Lister's Peopleware, first published in 1987, to sort out a nagging problem in my own office. Sometimes it's good to review the classics. It turns out, even though technology has changed the world since then, people haven't changed all that much. I might have to review Christopher Alexander next.

The New York City subway, with its passive air exchange system and tunnels too small for active ventilation or air conditioning, have gotten excessively hot this summer: On Thursday, temperatures inside at least one of the busiest stations reached 40°C—nearly 11°C warmer than the high in Central Park. The Regional Plan Association, an urban planning think tank for the greater metropolitan area, took a thermometer around the system’s 16 busiest stations, plus a few more for good measure, and shared the...