Testimony presented before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Subcommittee on Domestic Policy on March 12, 2008.

What Research Tells Us About the Reasonableness of the Current Priorities of National Drug Control

I think the future of advice is a cool topic because it turns out that there really are differences between advice and recommendations.

Michael Schrage on Ubiquity

I wish Obama had put out a statement saying something like this ...

Ditto bravo. Too bad it didn't happen.

Samanthagate | Hendrik Hertzberg

Becoming a doctor, I hoped, would bring me back into the real world,” Sandeep Jauhar writes in “Intern,” his fine memoir of his training in a New York City hospital. “It would make me into a man.” The story he tells here is antiheroic, full of uncertainty, doubt and frank disgust, aimed at both himself and, sometimes, his patients. “Intern” succeeds as an unusually transparent portrait of an imperfect human being trying to do his best at a tough job.

Imperfect Heroes

Imagine this scene. A wannabe autocrat faces a legislature dominated by his political opposition. He fixes elections with gusto, throws his opponents in the jail with regularity, and an opposition leader is even viciously assaulted on the floor of the senate. All to no avail. It seems the people like the idea of divided government. So then tyrannus rex decides to get still more ruthless—the opposition is all enmeshed in some criminal conspiracy, his sock puppet press starts to announce. And one day, law officers charge onto the floor of the legislature as it is in session to serve warrants on a large block of members, and as it turns out just the members he’s most eager to get rid of. Lukashenko’s Belarus, perhaps? Or some forgotten banana republic?

Well, no, actually. This all really happened in George W. Bush’s America. In one of the fifty states. Indeed, in the first state by roll call: Alabama.

Alice Martin’s War

Donnie opens his home to a new friend.

You Suck at Photoshop #8

Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy. One man’s odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity

The Autumn of the Multitaskers

Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.

"My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy."

The Pyrotechnic Imagination

Fashion facilitates economic growth by providing consumers twin opportunities: to periodically liquidate their dated fashion goods, especially those that may have been consumption mistakes, as they abandon old fashion rules and adopt new ones; and to consume alternative goods that, thanks to standardisation, cater for the varying risk preferences of consumers. This process may seem wasteful from a static account, but it is dynamically efficient in the promotion change and re-coordination that eventually registers as economic growth. Rather than being merely a feature of bourgeois leisure, engaging with fashion trends might be better understood as a process of creative destruction that works through social pressure to provide a fresh and self-regulated impetus for consumer learning. Fashion cycles work to periodically loosen accumulated constraints on the demand side, facilitating economic growth and personal development. Fashion is part of how economies evolve, not of how they decay. It is another name for consumer entrepreneurship: and the more we have of that, the better.

Fashionomics

Brad DeLong:

To what extent are rich countries obligated to open their markets to poor countries when the consequence is falling wages for the poor in the rich--bearing in mind that the poor in the rich are often wealthier and have more opportunity than the rich in the poor? To what extent do rich countries do themselves well--serve their national interest--by opening their markets to poor countries even when the consequence is falling wages for the poor in the rich?

Free Trade and Fair Trade