In the great tradition of pundits pontificating on products that they have not yet used, I want to go on record as saying Facebook Timeline will be a flop. I can see the value of something like this for showing to very close family but I just don’t understand why you want to want to [...]
Diane Ravitch in the New York Review of Books: It is a well-known fact that American education is in crisis. Black and Hispanic children have lower test scores than white and Asian children. The performance of American students on international tests is mediocre. Less well known are contrary facts. The black–white achievement gap, as a [...]
Anand Girdharadas at the New York Times: Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never it occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess [...]
I realise that, when this launches, it’ll be U.S.-only but I wish this were coming to Australia/Japan, stat.
Just breathtaking. (Via Andrew Wright.)
Came across this today. Beautiful acoustic version of Metric’s ‘Help I’m Alive’.
Remember how curation became the ‘in’ thing to do in 2010? It’s like we finally found a reason to justify posting links to our blogs: we were ‘curating’. Well, the other day I signed up to, and was invited into, Stellar. Stellar is kind of like an automated curation service. It can automate your own [...]
Another one from Grantland. Some of the back story to David Foster Wallace’s famous New York Times piece on Roger Federer (as well as the full excerpt of the article).
It’s up at Grantland (which is a really nicely design website). This is the type of thing to expect: “I’ve never understood musicians who don’t enjoy doing promotional interviews,” he says. “I just can’t believe it. I always think, ‘Your life must have been so brilliant before you were in a band.’ Because my life [...]
I don’t presume to understand Japanese politics but, looking at these photos, it seems hard to believe that the Government that has overseen such remarkable reconstruction isn’t doing better in the polls.