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Michel Goya is outstanding among the otherwise excellent French military blogs. The Chakrabortty points out that if the economists have learned nothing from hte crisis, this is as nothing to the absence of anything original about it from sociology or political science. Fission fragments: another person drops off the coalition project, making it possible to…

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Cracking set from Jamie xx. At the XOYO 1st birthday, I remember him playing the Prodigy’s No Good/Start The Dance, which doesn’t feature here but plenty of other good things do. This isn’t quite as weird as the Saharan Cellphone thing from a while back but it’s interesting: As good as ever. Lovebox 2013 –…

Unlearning Economics touches on Daniel Kahneman’s System One/System Two distinction. I think it’s worth repeating something that struck me about Thinking, Fast and Slow here. Kahneman specifically refuses to make a value judgment between the two, and repeatedly stresses that people trust to intuition for the very good reason that intuition is very often right.…

This Aeon piece makes the case that we are living in a golden age of mass literacy. I said as much in this thread from 2010, swinging off this IEEE Spectrum post, which argues that no media category grew as much since the 80s as text. Interestingly, DuckDuckGo finds all sorts of stuff but it…

(Been in the queue for a while) I’d assumed that actually *lots* of intelligent people considered Withnail and I charmless drinking-game boorishness (NB I don’t, obviously) — Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) March 29, 2013 So, why should you watch Withnail & I, other than just for the laughs? Comedy built on tragedy There’s Monty, tragically alone,…

“biased public opinion” has caused 70 percent of the civil servants to feel “stressed”, with about 30 percent of respondents saying they were “severely stressed.” news reports in the recent years have exaggerated the negative portrayals of civil servants and are often connected with phrases like “forced demolition”, “intercepting petitioners”, and “secret prisons.” You could…

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A lot of economists were arguing after Thatcher’s death something like this – the recessions caused terrible and lasting social misery, most of the North Sea oil money went up in smoke, the Lawson property boom didn’t do anyone any good, but you know, GDP per capita caught up with the Germans. Here’s Jonathan Portes…