Negative thinking may be exactly what we need.

I previously recommended Gawande's new book.

The Power of Negative Thinking | ATUL GAWANDE | NYT

What we have here is an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education by the author of a book about Charles Whitman.

Indeed, it is our mission in higher education to investigate and determine, as best we can, if there are "dots" to be connected. But during our inquiry we should not delude ourselves or ignore the obvious.

The Whitman case taught me that sometimes our zeal to champion causes important to us or to explain the unexplainable and be "enlightened" blinds us to the obvious.

... sensational questions from irresponsible reporters ...

As long as we value living in a free society, we will be vulnerable to those who do harm -- because they want to and know how to do it.

How quickly people forget the message of Tom Friedman, just because the context is domestic instead of foreign.

A collection from the archives, for your consideration:

AQ Khan has signed a detailed confession ...

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ... your super-empowered man.

One day you wake up... and chaotic evil just doesn't seem like the right alignment for you any more.

Peking Duct Tape, and Web Logs as Weapons:

There has always been a World of Disorder, but what makes it more dangerous today is that in a networked universe, with widely diffused technologies, open borders and a highly integrated global financial and Internet system, very small groups of people can amass huge amounts of power to disrupt the World of Order. Individuals can become super-empowered.

In the long run, the "swarming" that really counts is the wide-scale mobilization of the global public.

To win, we must all become super-empowered individuals. Get happy, get angry, whatever; just get going.

The bloggers with agendas are, in fact, copycats, just with a different weapon.

Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state.

So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but also what I call "super-empowered individuals." Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful -- but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.

A rant from Decius:

... we've got a problem, and probably an intractable one.

TIA is a solution to the "problem" of super-empowered individuals that leaves a bad taste in my mouth for much the same reason that I don't ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

The Legacy of the Texas Tower Sniper

The rise of the handkerchief was not simply a function of shifting social mores. It was also a part of the "civilizing process" through which the haves became readily distinguishable from the have-nots.

Like much contemporary social criticism, Cooper's story lamented women's extraordinary expenditures for "fancy articles," the ribbons, trimmings, and "gew-gaws" so prized as emblems of nineteenth-century fashion sense. Such wasteful spending on luxuries, the tale suggested, was an indication that American women were losing that crucial frugality central to their identity as mothers and housewives. "What young man," a concerned father asks, "will dare to choose a wife from among young ladies who expend so much money on their pocket handkerchiefs?"

Oh, to long for the anxieties of times past.

Vulgar Things

What the reactions demonstrate is that no matter what happens, people are very good at finding confirmation for what they already think.

See also The easy answer to the Virginia Tech massacre.

False Lessons from an Atrocity

Following up on America's class system in numbers.

Call them yuppies, yippies, bobos, nobrows, or whatever, the consumers of the new luxury have a sense of entitlement that transcends social class, a conviction that the finest things are their birthright. Never mind that they may have been born into a family whose ancestral estate is a tract house in the suburbs, near the mall, not paid for, and whose family crest was downloaded from the Internet. Ditto the signet ring design. Language reflects this hijacking. Words such as gourmet, premium, boutique, chic, accessory, and classic have loosened from their elite moorings and now describe such ­top-­of-­category items as popcorn, hamburgers, discount brokers, shampoo, scarves, ice cream, and trailer parks. “Luxury for all” is an oxymoron, all right, the aspirational goal of modern culture, and the death knell of the real ­thing.

I want to direct your attention to this (for me) unexpectedly interesting piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

Radical Hope [excerpt] is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."

I'll also remind you of this quote, recently cited in a thread about Ross Anderson, from the French economist Jules Dupuit in 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Lux Populi

When everyone has a red pen, reading is value creation.

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia

Christopher Hitchens joins MemeStreams in its celebration of the American South.

I can clearly remember the first time I heard the expression y'all, which was at a Greyhound bus stop in Georgia more than 30 years ago.

Welcome to the You Decade

Vanity Fair is the latest magazine to publish images from the Worldmapper project.

Complex data—on fuel, plants, or recycling—can tell a simple story. With maps from a joint project between the Universities of Michigan and Sheffield (U.K.), a famed Harvard biologist lays bare the environmental bottom line.

Wilson offers a few tidbits of scientific trivia, such as:

If the bodies of all 6.5 billion human beings alive on earth today were log-stacked, they would fill less than a cubic mile.

Problems Without Borders, by E.O. Wilson

A few years ago, Meghan Daum, an op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a lesbian.

By Design, or a Lifestyle Choice?

The gentrification of rundown city neighborhoods conjures an image of well-off whites displacing poor minorities. What's actually going on is far more complex, and the winners and losers can be hard to predict.

Urban puzzle