sillygwailo
Can America’s bond market keep defying the vigilantes? Donald Trump’s threats over Greenland are the latest test An audacious new book about a “precocious” country There is no such thing as “the” Indian growth model National job stereotypes need updating Unemployment rates in rich countries are…
Finance & economics | Labour markets Will machines steadily eat our work opportunities? |4 min read By R.A. | WASHINGTON ONE might say it is an encouraging sign that public worry over technology has (for the most part) turned from fear of stagnation to fear of technological unemployment thanks to…
I’ve been through a few opinions on the Broadway problem . For clarity and to fuel debate, I thought I’d lay out my thinking here. (By way of background, I’m going to assume you’re familiar with the ’ robots took my job ’ theory on the future of capital, and that you’ve seen Google’s video of the…
Major League Baseball's egregious failure to protect catchers. http://t.co/6yRemhWcb0
I coined the term “Borg Complex” on a whim, and, though I’ve written on the concept a handful of times, nowhere have I presented a clear, straightforward description. That’s what this post provides — a quick, one-stop guide to the Borg Complex. What is a Borg Complex? A Borg Complex is exhibited by…
There are so many things about me that aren’t the fact that I’m a transgender woman. I haven’t talked about them so far in this series because, obviously, this series is about my experiences as a person becoming a new person. To talk about things aside from that would not be the point. I’d wager…
Sometimes, when you dig into the Earth, past its surface and into the crustal layers, omens appear. In 1676, Oxford professor Robert Plot was putting the final touches on his masterwork, The Natural History of Oxfordshire, when he received a strange gift from a friend. The gift was a fossil, a…
Ellen Ullman I'm an admirer of the writer Ellen Ullman, the software engineer turned novelist. Her 1997 memoir, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, is a wonderfully perceptive reflection on her years as a professional programmer. Ullman recently wrote a commentary for the New…
Up: Software Stories [] « ^ » « T » Thursday, January 30, 2003 Getting Close to the Machine A collection of quotes from a book by Ellen Ullman, prefaced by some good-natured technical meandering. I ju
The Washington that majestically unfurls in the credits for “House of Cards” is recognizable to anybody who has spent time there. But even though it can be a monumental kingdom filled with portent, it can also be a fairly quotidian and sometimes ugly small town — but that’s not the kind of place you…
Illustration by Anna Ruch / The Atlantic. Source: Heritage Images / Getty The Great Divorce The marriage between Europe and the United States has been fraught from the first—and now it might be coming apart. Eliot A. Cohen The Sports Conspiracy That’s Too Easy to Believe Kaitlyn Tiffany America’s…
A decade ago, you could see it perfectly. Today, you’d really have to strain your eyes to notice. The wound has mostly healed, it seems. That plastic edge must have been too dull to render a proper scar. Had I wanted my efforts to properly endure the past ten years, I should have made use of…
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. When I was a teenager, newly fixated on becoming a writer, I came across a piece of advice from Kurt Vonnegut that affected me like an ice cube down the back of my shirt. “Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites…
Page-Turner July 19, 2012 One of the pleasures of a recent piece on semicolons by Ben Dolnick, in the Times (“Semicolons: A Love Story”), was his reference to William James, whose deft use of the semicolon to pile on clauses, Dolnick writes, is “a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding…
In this excerpt from Stories About Storytellers, an explanation of the intriguing quotation on the cover: She has a formidable presence. She speaks in an accent that she says belongs to another era in Montreal, but to modern Canadian ears sounds English-influenced. She speaks with great, sibilant…
Designer Alex Grunenfelder with stacked boxes each containing one cubic foot of Vancouver space, now being marketed to general public. Photo: D. Beers. "Science tells us that physical space is infinitely divisible. This means that real estate density is theoretically unlimited, resulting in the…
Very much so. RT @Wu_Slu: @keithlaw Fascinating take on the Native American mascot question. http://t.co/GAlWUTGt2y
Clay Shirky observed at the Awl last week that he and I disagree over whether the trend toward MOOCs in higher education is reversible—he says no, and he says that I say yes—and I suppose he’s right, so far as that goes. But I don’t think that goes very far. There were a few cheap shots about…
In Russia, everyone should have a camera on their dashboard. It’s better than keeping a lead pipe under your seat for protection (but you might still want that lead pipe). The conditions of Russian roads are perilous, with insane gridlock in cities and gigantic ditches, endless swamps and severe…
Ryan Holmes gives @Mobify a nice shout out in this piece on the vancouver tech scene. http://t.co/4fB5bTTz
About Journal Projects Books Subscribe Donate Search Sign in About Us Contact Praise Donate About Us Contact Praise Donate About Journal Projects Books Exhausted by science and tech debates that go nowhere? Buy Back Issues print + digital $34 digital $24 Subscribe Today Renew Existing Subscription…
March of the Smart Cars: Tracking Car2Go in Vancouver Car2Go brought "private public transportation" to Vancouver in 2011, and has been attracting adherents ever since. The tiny, easy-to-park Smart Cars have woven themselves into the daily lives of Vancouverites. However, residents of certain…
"Far from detracting from struggle, being aware of one’s own privilege and actively working to ameliorate its effects can only enhance what we are trying to achieve."
Can *only* enhance?
The left, it’s fair to say, has a long tradition of infighting. Groups with only a hair’s breadth difference in ideology splinter off into rival factions, aggressively defending their interpretation of the One True Path. It’s the perfect example of what Freud called “the narcissism of small…
"Thus, the innovator’s dilemma. Incumbents appropriately ignore the new product because it is uneconomic to respond, but the incumbents’ quiescence can lead to their later downfall."
This sounds more like a dilemma for incumbents than innovators.
The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing. Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative…
One evening many years ago at a graduate school party, an elderly and reclusive poet asked me in all seriousness (he had no other mode) if I had ever been in love. I was twenty-three at the time and how was I supposed to answer that? I had been in the kind of love that I had been in. I told him…
The naysayer backlash to TED ’s announced migration to Vancouver must have taken all of 20 minutes, most of it devoted to complaints about how lame the lecture series has become. Having attended TED outside of its Long Beach home base ( TEDIndia 2009), I have seen the influence of this organization…
More than a decade ago, a guy named Jayson Musson, then a Philly art student, got into a bloody fight with a guy who'd been painting over his graffiti around town. He wrote a song about the fight, and last year, it was sampled into a new song, called "Harlem Shake." This month, piggybacking onto an…
Trending on Billboard Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” still has quite a ways to go before it becomes the next “Gangnam Style” in terms of total views, but the track became an unexpected viral smash last week at levels not seen since PSY’s American invasion — and it’s already climbing up the Billboard…
Best Pictures is a short series about this year’s Academy Award-nominated films. To: Jane Hu From: Kevin Nguyen Subject: SLP Jaaaane! I absolutely adored this movie. And for the past week, I’ve been telling anyone who will listen how much I liked it. But here’s the problem I run into: I have a hard…
Advertisement 1 This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Advertisement 2 Stories continue below This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
I’m not sure why, but this silly series of GIFs has made me totally reconsider the n-word. Up to this point, I had been of the thinking that one should not use the word unless it is already common to one’s own experience, unless one has some non-academic understanding such that implicit quotation…
It's been a year since Brent Toderian suddenly and controversially departed his job as the City of Vancouver's planning director. He now heads up his own city planning and urban consultancy firm, Toderian Urbanworks, where he's at work, among many other things locally, nationally and…
Opinion Editors’ note: We’re resurfacing this story from the archives because who doesn’t want to be more productive? THINK for a moment about your typical workday. Do you wake up tired? Check your e-mail before you get out of bed? Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly…
Michael Haneke’s Amour is a nice movie to have seen, but a very annoying one to watch. The movie is gratingly slow. With its stationary camera and long takes of an old married couple (Jean-Louis Trintignat and Emmanuele Riva), one of whom suffers a stroke and begins a slow demise, the movie demands…
Asher J. Kohn A sci-fi riff on Middle Eastern building traditions. "Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative," writes Asher J. Kohn. Kohn, an American law student and editor of The Tuqay , a website covering "Central Asia and its hinterlands,"…
I wanted to make sure everyone saw Dexter Filkins' response to this weeks news regarding Obama's justification for the killing of American citizens, as well as the hearings to confirm John Brennan. Filkins describes an earlier visit to meet with villagers in Yemen. The villagers were survivors of an…
Random meta-political noodling here ... For a while I've had the unwelcome feeling that we're living under occupation by Martian invaders. (Not just here in the UK, but everyone, everywhere on the planet.) Something has gone wrong with our political processes, on a global scale. But what? It's…
Tariffs can be to blame for products that cost more in Canada than the U.S. ( Toronto Star illustration ) By Economy Wed., Feb. 6, 2013 Everything from books to hockey pants and cars could be cheaper if Ottawa eliminated many import tariffs or brought them into line with lower U.S. rates, a Senate…
No articles.