Kenneth Minogue:

The most difficult of all tasks is making sense of one's own time.

The question about our own time I want to explore is: why have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively?

To Hell with Niceness

Another front beckons.

Mexico is sending thousands more troops and federal police to the country's most violent city, where law and order is on the brink of collapse in a war between gangs supplying drugs to the United States.

"We're throwing everything into this. We are cleaning the house," said President Felipe Calderon in an interview on Mexican television.

Have you seen Gomorrah?

Send more troops!

Shankar Vedantam:

David Levine, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis, said it was useful to distinguish between altruistic punishment and schadenfreude. Taking pleasure in the discomfort of others is counterproductive, whereas targeting anger at people who violate the public trust can serve a strategic and useful purpose.

The problem with altruistic punishment, of course, is that it is driven by a feeling of uncontrollable anger. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. Only a very strong drive could prompt individuals to put themselves at risk for the good of the group. But as a result, experiments show, there are people even willing to bring the entire house down if that is the only way to punish the fat cats who elevate narrow self-interest above the common good.

There is a middle way between cold rationalism and irrational, self-destructive anger: Pour taxpayer money into fixing broken institutions, but make sure those responsible for the catastrophe pay -- and pay publicly. As Levine put it, just because you don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water doesn't mean you don't throw out the bath water.

The Rational Underpinnings of Irrational Anger

D. T. Max on DFW:

Wallace was trying to write differently, but the path was not evident to him.

The Unfinished

Niall Ferguson:

It began as a sub-prime surprise, then became a credit crunch and is now a global financial crisis. At last month's World Economic Forum at Davos there was much finger-pointing - Russia and China blamed the US, everyone blamed the bankers, the bankers blamed everyone - but little in the way of forward-looking ideas. From where I was sitting, most attendees were still stuck in the Great Repression: deeply anxious, but fundamentally in denial about the nature and magnitude of the problem.

The great repression

David Foster Wallace:

Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month.

Wiggle Room

Brigid Delaney:

Their disquiet about the site is not always due to the usual concerns — privacy, data ownership, the stealth advertising — but something more grubby, and modern: self-promotion.

Oh, vanity, thy name is all over Facebook

Craig Partridge:

This essay is based on notes from a lecture I gave at Stanford in 1999. That lecture was easily the most popular one of the course and several people encouraged me to put the ideas on-line.

The idea behind the lecture was to provide very basic information that the average computer science student needs, and that my friends and I found that we were not given by the time we had graduated from college. Some of the advice here is from my own experience, but a lot is also from the experience of friends, several of whom kindly shared advice they wished they’d gotten earlier.

Here is the career advice, in summary:

Manage Your Boss
Experiment
Avoid Becoming a Manager
Learn to Write
Learn to Speak Well
Finish Projects
Do Your Homework for Reviews and Raises
Keep Your Skills Current

Things I Wish I'd Been Told

Joel Lovell:

It's weird and disconcerting that after all that has happened there are still so many experts out there willing to dispense wisdom with utter assuredness, day after day, despite having been so spectacularly wrong in the past. Their confidence saps my own. For those of us in the advice business -- and this extends beyond just investment advice to everything else in our lives that now exists in the firm grip of uncertainty -- the challenge is: How do I tell people what to do when prospects are so grim and outcomes so completely unpredictable? How do I acknowledge the limits of what I know while still maintaining credibility?

These are questions the Jim Cramers of the world, and the ubiquitous and somewhat frighteningly undaunted Suze Orman, don't seem very interested in dealing with.

What Do They Know?

We are a cyber nation. The U.S. information infrastructure - including telecommunications and computer networks and systems and the data that reside on them - is critical to virtually every aspect of modern life. This information infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, disruption and destruction by a growing array of adversaries.

The President's Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) calls for leap-ahead research and technology to reduce vulnerabilities to attacks in cyberspace. Unlike many research agenda that aim for steady progress in the advancement of science, the leap-ahead effort seeks a few revolutionary ideas with the potential to reshape the landscape.

The NITRD Program Senior Steering Group (SSG) for cybersecurity R&D invites you to participate in the National Cyber Leap Year.

National Cyber Leap Year