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INFOGRAPHIC: A Whole New Ballpark
November 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
SAN FRANCISCO: After voters rejected four public referendums to fund a new Giants stadium, owners built it entirely from private funding. It was the first purely private stadium in 40 years. PITTSBURGH: The Penguins' Consol Energy Center was built with almost no public money, instead using cash from private companies and contributions from casino owners under a deal allowing new gambling operations. INDIANAPOLIS: Public financing accounted for 50 percent of the new Lucas Oil Stadium, offset by taxes on hotels, rental cars, restaurants, and sales of Colts license plates. CINCINNATI: Debt ... Read More
Good Night, Vietnam
November 6, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Carol Worthman Anthropologist of Unconsciousness, Emory University WHAT’S HER DEAL? Trying to find out how television affects our sleep. HOW IS SHE DOING THAT? Worthman and her staff are currently documenting patterns of slumber among residents of 14 off-the-grid villages in a remote corner of Vietnam. Some of the 3,000 residents will soon be fitted with wireless GPS monitors and wristwatch-like gadgets that sense movement to determine whether the wearers are awake, resting, or asleep. Those devices will feed Worthman’s lab in Atlanta real-time data on where and when her subjects ... Read More
Corridors of the Mind
November 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
ARCHITECTS HAVE BEEN talking for years about “biophilic” design, “evidence based” design, design informed by the work of psychologists. But last May, at the profession’s annual convention, John Zeisel and fellow panelists were trying to explain neuroscience to a packed ballroom. The late-afternoon session pushed well past the end of the day; questions just kept coming. It was a scene, Zeisel marveled—all this interest in neuroscience—that would not have taken place just a few years earlier. Zeisel is a sociologist and architect who has researched the design of facilities ... Read More
Mouse-Infest Destiny
November 1, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AGO I didn’t have the slightest interest in mouse urine. But after some study I’ve concluded that it is covertly running and ruining the world, strangling small children, and driving the profits of Big Pharma. I came to know mouse urine, the molecules of which are known as MUPs (Major Urinary Proteins), and specifically as Mus m 1, because the molecules were stubbornly clinging to the studs of a cabin that I recently bought. Though I didn’t yet know the molecular names or weights of my MUPs, I knew they were there. Mice had burrowed through the cabin’s fiberglass ... Read More
False Clarity, Authentic Confusion
October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy By Edward N. Luttwak, Harvard University Press. Chinese Characters: Profiles of Fast-Changing Lives in a Fast-Changing Land Editors: Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, University of California Press. IN THE THREE DECADES since China opened its doors to the world, there is little indication that the West has grown any closer to understanding the Chinese. This is no surprise. Understanding China has been an elusive goal of the West—with, arguably, little progress—since the Jesuit missions of the 16th century. Two recent books provide ... Read More
The Love Bot
October 30, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
THE ROBOT IS SMILING AT ME, his red rubbery lips curved in a cheery grin. I’m seated in front of a panel with 10 numbered buttons, and the robot, a three-foot-tall, legless automaton with an impish face, is telling me which buttons to push and which hand to push them with. Touch seven with your right hand; touch three with your left. The idea is to go as fast as I can. When I make a mistake, he corrects me; when I speed up, he tells me how much better I’m doing. Despite the simplicity of our interactions, I’m starting to like the little guy. Maybe it’s his round silvery eyes and ... Read More
The Death Penalty is Experiencing Technical Difficulties
October 29, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
LOS ANGELES DISTRICT ATTORNEY Steve Cooley is in a hurry to have Mitchell Sims put to death. You couldn’t blame Cooley if he felt frustrated. He’s seen the execution of Sims, a convicted triple murderer, delayed for six solid years, bogged down in a legal quagmire over whether California’s three-chemical lethal-injection sequence is a sufficiently humane method of killing someone. By the time the courts decide the issue, the state might not even be able to obtain the deadly drugs required. And to top it off, Cooley may be running out of time: this November, the state’s voters may ... Read More
The Least Interesting Man in the World
October 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
IN THE EARLY 1950s, Ian Fleming, an Englishman living in Jamaica, was working on a spy novel and, as he told The New Yorker a decade later, he conceived the central figure as “an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened.” Searching for a suitably boring name, Fleming found it on his bookshelf, in the name of the ornithologist who authored the field guide Birds of the West Indies: James Bond. The inherent anonymity of those two syllables, and the blank slate they imply, hint at why the fictional British secret agent is at the center of the longest-running film franchise ... Read More
Speak, Memory
October 25, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
A FEW YEARS AGO, Captain Emmanuel Joseph decided to learn Arabic before his deployment to Iraq. “At first it was easy,” he told me. At his base in the U.S., he explains, “we had native speakers teaching us basic things like greetings; imperatives like stop, go, walk; and some numbers and nouns. It was very much survival-level.” In Iraq, Joseph (not his real name) continued trying to learn Arabic with Al-Kitaab, the main textbook used by American universities and the military. But he struggled. “I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the ... Read More
