MetaFilter posts tagged with nytimes

Rose-Colored Ribbons

Diablevert — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 06:01:27 -0800

Our Feel-Good War On Breast Cancer (SLNYT)

"the current system is the most practical and 'seems to work'"

Rory Marinich — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 08:56:10 -0800

"Despite her pedigree, success came slowly," the story bravely ventured. This slowness was maybe not so apparent to several thousand other 24-year-olds who want to be actresses, but who haven't even figured out how to get to a reading for Law & Order to fail at it. Tom Scocca on Nathaniel Rich, Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, and cultural nepotism. (Related: How David Carr Became the Daddy of Girls)

Even Nixon & Reagan and the NRA once dabbled in gun control.

Obscure Reference — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 17:26:25 -0800

The ghost of gun control revisits the history of gun control in the US. (SLNYTOPED)

Lake Erie is sick.

Fizz — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 10:18:48 -0800

Spring Rain, Then Foul Algae in Ailing Lake Erie: [New York Times]

"A thick and growing coat of toxic algae appears each summer, so vast that in 2011 it covered a sixth of its waters, contributing to an expanding dead zone on its bottom, reducing fish populations, fouling beaches and crippling a tourism industry that generates more than $10 billion in revenue annually."

“The important thing,” he said, “is moving.”

Fizz — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 08:28:14 -0800

Becoming the All-Terrain Human: [New York Times]

"Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams."

“What you cannot do, a Cossack can.”

Fizz — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 06:33:19 -0800

The Cossacks Are Back. May the Hills Tremble. [New York Times]

"In his third term, President Vladimir V. Putin has offered one clear new direction for the country: the development of a conservative, nationalist ideology. Cossacks have emerged as a kind of mascot, with growing financial and political support."

"That lawsuit, believe it or not, is still going on."

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:36:26 -0800

Where Banks really Make Money On IPOs

All of these numbers are hypothetical, of course, but the bigger point is simple: if Goldman manages to get kickbacks, in terms of extra commissions, of more than 7% of its clients’ profits, then it has a financial incentive to underprice the IPO. And Goldman’s clients were desperate to give it kickbacks: they didn’t just route their standard trading through Goldman, since that wouldn’t generate enough commissions. Instead, they bought and sold stocks on the same day, at the same price. Capstar Holding, for instance, bought 57,000 shares in Seagram Ltd at $50.13 per share on June 21, 1999 — and then sold them, on the same day, at the same price. Capstar made nothing on the trade, but Goldman made a commission of $5,700. Capstar’s Christopher Rule says that in May 1999, fully 70% of all of his trading activity “was done solely for the purpose of generating commissions”, so that he could continue to keep on getting IPO allocations.

Rigging The IPO Game Via. Morgan Stanley To Pay Fine Over Improprieties In Facebook IPO Run-Up Curriculum Vitae: "the steps by and through which an eager young tadpole fresh from the leafy groves of academe transforms him or herself into a hoary old bullfrog barking orders and swilling scotch from a gilded lily pad."

The very intellectual and personal qualities which make you an attractive and effective candidate for Analyst or Associate become increasingly irrelevant, only to be replaced by interpersonal skills and predilections which are often fundamentally at odds with your prior role and responsibilities. For this reason alone, we see substantial attrition, both voluntary and involuntary, in Vice President ranks across my industry. It is not for nothing my fellow Associates and I made fun, shortly after we arrived, of an aging Vice President at my first firm, who could not seem to make the transition. We dubbed him amongst ourselves a “very, very good Associate.” He did not last very long. I have said it before: the higher you get in my business, the more it becomes pure sales. Vice President is when a banker really begins to see the truth of this remark for herself, and it is when she (and her bank) must make the determination whether she has the goods to continue.

“Miss me? Well, I’m not dead yet.”

Fizz — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 06:59:04 -0800

Nora Ephron’s Final Act by Jacob Bernstein (her son). [NYTimes.com]

"At 10 p.m. on a Friday night in a private room on the 14th Floor of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on 68th and York Avenue, my mother was lying in her bed hallucinating, in that dream space people go on their way to being gone."

Now watch this drive

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:02:24 -0800

The Verge (video) and the New York Times (text) push the Tesla Model S electric car to its limits

"they did not know or expect that the evidence would point to Tehran."

the man of twists and turns — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:06:28 -0800

A Trail of Bullet Casings Leads From Africa’s Wars Back to Iran. Iran’s Cartridges & Their Quiet Distribution to Brutal Regimes and Many Wars. "Conflict Armament Research identifies and tracks conventional weapons in contemporary armed conflicts. Established in 2011, it was created in response to the growing need for informed, on-the-ground reporting on weapons proliferation in modern wars and insurgencies. " The "Small Arms Survey is an independent research project located at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland." Skirting The Law: Sudan's Post-CPA Arms Flows (PDF) Iran's Ammunition And Metallurgy Industries Group.

You keep giving Adderall to my son, you're going to kill him

sweetkid — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 17:06:36 -0800

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions. NYTimes link. From the article: "The story of Richard Fee, an athletic, personable college class president and aspiring medical student, highlights widespread failings in the system through which five million Americans take medication for A.D.H.D., doctors and other experts said." Trigger warning: addiction, suicide.

Modern, Old-Timey Love

roomthreeseventeen — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 09:07:31 -0800

"We must never travel separately again.” Author Eve Pell on old, young love.

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Fizz — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 08:25:29 -0800

The Price of a Stolen Childhood [NYTimes.com] When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet.

"The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixilation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her."

“The cruelty of the ballet world has become surprisingly pathological.”

Fizz — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:00:14 -0800

Bolshoi Ballet Director Is Victim of Acid Attack: [NYTimes.com] "A masked man threw acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the legendary Bolshoi Ballet, on Thursday night, leaving him with third-degree burns and possibly threatening his eyesight, Bolshoi officials said on Friday morning."

the end of history illusion

flex — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 11:48:38 -0800

Why You Won’t Be the Person You Expect to Be (NYT): "When we remember our past selves, they seem quite different. We know how much our personalities and tastes have changed over the years. But when we look ahead, somehow we expect ourselves to stay the same... They called this phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” in which people tend to “underestimate how much they will change in the future.”" (via exp.lore) A new study led by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, examines why you won’t stay the same.

Why? Dr. Gilbert and his collaborators, Jordi Quoidbach of Harvard and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia, had a few theories, starting with the well-documented tendency of people to overestimate their own wonderfulness. “Believing that we just reached the peak of our personal evolution makes us feel good,” Dr. Quoidbach said. “The ‘I wish that I knew then what I know now’ experience might give us a sense of satisfaction and meaning, whereas realizing how transient our preferences and values are might lead us to doubt every decision and generate anxiety.” Or maybe the explanation has more to do with mental energy: predicting the future requires more work than simply recalling the past. “People may confuse the difficulty of imagining personal change with the unlikelihood of change itself,” the authors wrote in Science.

*If you're avoiding NYT links, it's also on The Scientist: Metamorphosis Complete *Here is the study's abstract at Science (Science 4 January 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6115 pp. 96-98) *text & audio from All Things Considered at NPR: You Can't See It, But You'll Be A Different Person In 10 Years *the study's weaknesses at Health.com: People Underestimate How Much They Might Change in the Future: Studyr Wild Fox Zen: The End of History Illusion And Some Implications

In Buddhism we call the end of history illusion a “fixed idea of a self” and sometimes try to address it by looking back over the course of our life and how we’ve changed, starting with our baby pictures. The research here suggests that this dharma strategy is not likely to be effective. You see, we’re good at looking at the past and appreciating we’ve changed. We’re bad at looking at the future and appreciating that “we” will be somebody else and our choices now will create our future self. What can we do today that our future self would want? This is a hard question because we somehow fool ourselves into thinking we’re at the end of change now. The awesome face of emptiness may be just too hard to be – if we think there’s another choice... And now for why this matters for the US, for Soto Zen, and for me...

RoarMag: Psychologists discover “end of history illusion”

For a political economist like myself, the question that immediately arises is: what are the political implications of these findings? Obviously, the notion of the “end of history” is a political-philosophical idea coined by Hegel. By way of the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève it was subsequently picked up by the American political economist Francis Fukuyama, who used the concept to argue that the fall of the Soviet Union inaugurated the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy and capitalism.

Daniel Gilbert previously: the vagaries of religious experience - positive psychology

Beate Sirota Gordon, 1923-2012; "The Only Woman In The Room"

flex — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:45:45 -0800

Beate Sirota Gordon, Long-Unsung Heroine of Japanese Women’s Rights, Dies at 89: a NYT obituary relates the fascinating story of a young woman who was just the right person in just the right place at just the right time and managed to strike a blow for gender equality.

A civilian attached to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s army of occupation after World War II, Ms. Gordon was the last living member of the American team that wrote Japan’s postwar Constitution. Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day. “It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday... “By just writing those things into the Constitution — our Constitution doesn’t have any of those things — Beate Gordon intervened at a critical moment. And what kind of 22-year-old gets to write a constitution?” If Ms. Gordon, neither lawyer nor constitutional scholar, was indeed an unlikely candidate for the task, then it is vital to understand the singular confluence of forces that brought her to it: Had her father not been a concert pianist of considerable renown; had she not been so skilled at foreign languages; and had she not been desperate to find her parents, from whom she was separated during the war and whose fate she did not know for years, she never would have been thrust into her quiet, improbable role in world history.

*on Wikipedia *The Story of Beate Sirota, a transcript of a 1999 Nightline interview *About Beate Sirota Gordon at the site for the film The Gift From Beate (Japan, 2004) *The Japan Times - Film depicts Japan's gender equality strife: Written by American woman, Article 24 now seen under LDP threat (link via Shakesville) *The Jewish Daily Forward - Beate Sirota Gordon Dies at 89: Asia Arts Expert Pushed for Japanese Women's Rights *Asia Society - Remembering 'Iconic' Beate Sirota Gordon, 1923-2012; includes two YouTube videos of Gordon speaking in 2007 and 2011 *Shinya Watanabe - Beate Sirota Gordon; includes photos (link via Hoyden about Town)

The Lives They Lived

danny the boy — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:34:04 -0800

The New York Times Magazine's latest issue, The Lives They Lived, is a tribute to cultural icons that have died in 2012. Adam Yauch, a.k.a MCA of the Beastie Boys, is featured on the cover. Alex Pappademas of Grantland writes about MCA's growth as a person, and how it influnced the group:

It's Yauch who raps, “I wanna say a little something that's long overdue/The disrespect to women has got to be through” on “Sure Shot,” from “Ill Communication” (1994). Should it have been obvious from the beginning that disrespecting women wasn't O.K.? Sure. But now they were calling themselves on their own failings of judgment.

He's included in The Music They Made, a montage of the musicians who died this year. The issue also features: Neil Armstrong, Don Cornelius, Whitney Houston, Maurice Sendak, and many others.

Make Babies

vidur — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:30:02 -0800

"Older parenthood will upend American society." "Is waiting to have kids a big mistake?" "Why do women believe they can delay children for so long?" "Older men are more likely than young ones to father a child who develops autism or schizophrenia, because of random mutations that become more numerous with advancing paternal age."

“This is also the limits of photography in that sense; it only goes so far in understanding what’s in front of you,”

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:34:20 -0800

New York Times' Lens blog: Looking at the Tangled Roots of Violence in Northern Nigeria highlights the work of Benedicte Kurzen.

Ms. Kurzen said. “I’m only photographing the symptoms of phenomena, of dynamics: symptoms translated through the daily life of the people. But I don’t think I’ll ever really know or really understand what’s cooking underground.”

Christmas Tree Science

ennui.bz — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 07:17:07 -0800

Pop-Up Forests and Experimental Christmas Trees

Oh those crazy kids!

OmieWise — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:21:46 -0800

"For a few months in 1922, throngs of America’s youth — from schoolkids to shopgirls — were swept up in a leaderless pyramid scheme that promised “something for nothing” and encouraged promiscuous flirtation. These were the “Shifters.” This is their (brief) story." (NYTimes link) Previously on the flappers and flapper slang: 1, 2.

"If I was to die, today or tomorrow, I do not think I would die satisfied till you tell me you will try and marry some good, smart man that will take care of you and the children"

the man of twists and turns — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 07:28:35 -0800

Author Jon Meacham has a new book out on Thomas Jefferson. It is reviewed in the New York Times: Cultivating Control in a Nation’s Crucible

But this book does not address its principal concern, power, until Jefferson has accrued some. When it comes to the force that he wielded as a slaveholder, Mr. Meacham finds ways to suggest that thoughts of abolition would have been premature; that it was not uncommon for white heads of households to be waited on by slaves who bore family resemblances to their masters; and that since Jefferson treated slavery as a blind spot, the book can too.

At the same time, Henry Wiencek has written a "scathing assessment of America’s third president," and the two books together have kicked off some controversy. Wiencek's article in Smithsonian, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

The very existence of slavery in the era of the American Revolution presents a paradox, and we have largely been content to leave it at that, since a paradox can offer a comforting state of moral suspended animation. Jefferson animates the paradox. And by looking closely at Monticello, we can see the process by which he rationalized an abomination to the point where an absolute moral reversal was reached and he made slavery fit into America’s national enterprise.

In Salon, Meacham claims "I’m not letting Thomas Jefferson off the hook"

And if someone as monumental in our memories as Jefferson can be seen as someone trying to work out real problems in real time, making compromises, settling for half a loaf when you might want a full loaf, then I think that should give us a kind of confidence and a kind of hope that we can overcome the seemingly insuperable obstacles that lead us to think of politics as contentious and frustrating.

And in Slate, Anette Gordon-Reed replies to Wiencek: Thomas Jefferson Was Not a Monster: Debunking a major new biography of our third president.

The book's tone and presentation betray a journalistic obsession with “the scoop.” Getting the scoop can be the life’s blood of journalism. It does not work so well for writing history, which is not always (or almost ever, really) about discovering things previously unknown. This sensibility leads Weincek astray in a number of ways. To begin with, it compels him to write as if he had discovered, and was writing about, things that had not been discovered and written about before. In truth, all of the important stories in this book have been told by others.

Wiencek responds in Smithsonian: The author of a new book about Thomas Jefferson makes his case and defends his scholarship

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson's "plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory." Gordon-Reed cannot like the now established truth that the locus of Jefferson's "kinder, gentler slavery" was the very place where children were beaten to get them to work. At first I assumed that she simply did not know about the beatings, but when I double-checked her book's references to the nailery I discovered that she must have known: A few hundred pages away from her paean to the nail factory, she cited the very letter in which "the small ones" are described as being lashed there.

On 30 NOV, Paul Finkleman in a New York Times Op-Ed countered with :The Monster Of Monticello

Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.

David Post at Volokh Conspiracy writes: Why Don’t People Get It About Jefferson and Slavery?

This is truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense. The truth is that few people in human history did more, over the course of a lifetime, to “place the road on the road to liberty for all” — and indeed, to eliminate human slavery from the civilized world — than Jefferson.

Corey Robin at Crooked Timber asks: Thomas Jefferson: American Fasicst? and examines his letters to conclude:

Jefferson was not a liberal hypocrite, a symptom of his time. He was the avant garde of a group of American theorists who were struggling to reconcile the ideals of the Declaration with the reality of chattel slavery. His resolution of that struggle took the form of one of the most vicious doctrines of racial supremacy the world had yet seen. That is his legacy, or at least part of his legacy. He was by no means the only one to take this route, but he was one of the earliest and easily the most famous. He is the tributary of what would become an American tradition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic responds to Post: Slavery Is A Love Song

This is a letter that I often turn to. It was written to Laura Spicer by her husband, who was sold away, much as Jefferson sold people away. After emancipation she repeatedly tried to rekindle their love, despite the fact that the husband had now remarried and formed another family. In this letter the husband tells us what it means to be among the refuse of history:

Coates reacts to a "predictable" defense of Jefferson

In TK, Jefferson's protege Edward Coles--knowing of Jefferson's brilliant anti-slavery writings--wrote to enlist him in the cause of ridding Virginia of slavery. Coles thought to begin this effort by manumitting his own slaves. Jefferson not only declined to help Coles, but told him he was wrong to try to free his own

Henry Wiencek writes about the 'rumpus' on his blog, while Jon Meacham was interviewed on The Daily Show on 14 NOV: aired segment and full interview.

social impact bonds

flex — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:34:32 -0800

Are Social Impact Bonds a good way to invest in public services? "Imagine a contract where private investors are paid by the government if there's a decrease in homelessness or convicts re-offending. It's a an idea that's taking shape in the UK and some US states. And now the Canadian government is considering piloting social impact bonds. Critics say it's a way of governments shirking their responsibilities." CBC's "The Current" reports. Summary at the main link; show is audio (listen at the main link), 24 min. long. Also covered on AlJazeera's The Stream program - lots of videos & infographics at the link; direct link to video is Betting on public good? (<--- story begins at this time-adjusted link, lasts about 20 min.; postshow lasts 6 min.) *Toronto Star - Feds introduce controversial ‘social impact bonds’ to fund social services

The federal government is introducing a controversial new approach to funding social services called “social impact bonds” that can turn a profit for private investors. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, who have often been accused of short-changing social programs, view the bonds as a valuable source of fresh funding for Canadian communities. ...Under Finley’s proposal, the government would contract with a non-profit organization or a private, for-profit business to supply a service, such as building affordable housing, counselling ex-convicts to keep them from reoffending, or working with at-risk youth. Funds would be raised from investors or charities to finance the project and, if the goals of the project were reached, the investors would be repaid their original investment plus a profitable return by Ottawa. If the project’s goals weren’t met, the federal government wouldn’t pay. The bonds, which have caught on in a big way in Britain and the United States, are a source of widespread debate. Many praise the idea as an innovative strategy to tap private capital and market discipline to address underfunded social goals. But critics say the bonds privatize social objectives in a way that gets governments and the public off the hook for paying for needed programs. “It’s a commercialization of social values,” said David Macdonald, a senior economist at the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. One of the foremost questions about this funding model concerns how the outcomes are measured to decide whether it’s a success that leads to a payout for investors. Macdonald said private-sector investors will learn how to arrange the project and the eventual performance assessment in a way that ensures they don’t end up holding the bag. “What will probably end up happening is that the government will pay dramatically more for programs that 10 years ago would have been funded because they were good ideas,” he remarked. “Now they’ll run them through this bond system, whereby some private financier makes 10 per or 20 per cent on their investment rather than the government evaluating a good idea and saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea, let’s fund that.’ Critics have also questioned whether the bond program will lead to reduced funding for non-profit organizations supplying valuable but hard-to-measure services.

*NYT - Giving Back More Than A Warm Feeling: Investors profit by giving through social impact bonds

The seven teenagers sit with their feet tucked under tan desks in a classroom in New York City’s Rikers Island jail... The adolescents are part of a new program aimed at building personal responsibility and life skills, with the goal that fewer of them will re-offend. The program is financed by an innovative mechanism called a social impact bond, one of a handful of ways that philanthropy is trying to tap new pools of funding to produce measurable social results. If the program succeeds in significantly reducing recidivism, the “investors” paying its upfront costs — in this case, Goldman Sachs, with backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies — will be repaid by the city with a modest return. If the program falls short, the investors lose their money, sparing taxpayers the costs of the program. The “social impact bond,” also known as a “pay for success” bond, is the latest — and most discussed — tool in a broader playbook philanthropists are using to blend business and charity to make a bigger difference. Sometimes known as impact investing, these approaches include providing low-interest loans to nonprofits, making equity investments in companies that tackle social problems and investing a portion of a foundation’s endowment in enterprises that produce measurable benefits to society and a financial return...

*wikipedia - social impact bond *SocialFinance.ca - social impact bonds *Gov't of Canada Economic Action Plan - The Government of Canada is Taking Action to Address Local Challenges *Knowledge@Wharton - Social Impact Bonds: Can a Market Prescription Cure Social Ills? *NYT Opinionator - The Promise of Social Impact Bonds *The Economist - Playing with Fire and Being Good Pays *SSIReview: Social Impact Bonds: Lessons from the field *Stanford Social Innovation Review - The Trouble With Impact Investing, Part 1: "There's only one bottom line. It ought to be impact." (Part 2 & Part 3) *RCI (Radio Canada International) - Ottawa’s new social policy will mostly benefit private sector, says economist

The Trendiest Guy in New York City

latkes — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 10:07:06 -0800

Living The New York Times trend piece. And previously, The Most Emailed New York Times Article Ever.

I don’t know what direction America is headed in, but whichever way it is, I need him elected.

wcfields — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:35:38 -0800

The Audacity Of Louis Ortiz is a kickstarter funded documentary that chronicles the life and times an unemployed Puerto Rican man from the Bronx, whose life completely changed when he was told that he resembles Barack Obama. The story of Ortiz has been featured on This American Life, NY Times, and DRS 3. Ortiz as Obama has been featured in a few TV spots including an episode of Flight of the Concords and a Korean satellite TV commercial.