The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon

Thanks to Elliot for passing this op ed piece my way.
That quality work force was the single biggest reason the U.S. emerged as the economic superpower of the 20th century. Generation after generation, American workers were better educated, more industrious and more innovative than the ones that came before.
That progress stopped about 30 years ago.
On [...]

Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters is perhaps the most insightful article I’ve read about the current presidential race. In a race full of baby boomer politicians–Clinton, McCain, Guiliani–why does Obama seem to stick out so much? It’s not that he’s black. I don’t even think that it’s about the Politics [...]

Extreme Pumpkins in an annual competition in which contestants carve awesome, freaky, and often hilarious pumpkins. Well worth looking through. This one, though not part of the Extreme Pumpkins site, is definitely my favorite that I’ve seen so far!

The Future is Drying Up. A great read from the New York Times Magazine.
In short, population growth is overtaxing the limited supply of fresh water available in the western states, and we really need to do something about it relatively soon.

In his recent essay, Paul Graham says:

Practically everyone thinks that someone who went to MIT or Harvard or Stanford must be smart. Even people who hate you for it believe it.
But when you think about what it means to have gone to an elite college, how could this be true? We’re talking about a decision [...]

Corn-based ethanol is just dumb for many reasons, but an important and undercited reason is that it drives up the price of corn. Similarly, biofuel demand in Germany has driven up the price of glucose by 30%, which will intern drive up the price of a huge variety of snacks, including gummy bears. [...]

TheScientist has an article that discusses a disease called “Greening” that has already decimated the orange populations of China and Thailand, and has started killing those in Brazil and the United States (the global #1 and #2 orange producers, respectively). Could we be at the beginning of an orange-free future?

“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
An excellent article from the Old Grey Lady about the state of our diet in America. It’s a retrospective on food science and studies from the last 30 years, and is as liberating as it is enlightening. One choice paragraph from near the beginning of the lengthy [...]

Or, at least that’s what I might say if my blood were radioactive enough to set off security detectors. Around 60,000 Americans are currently under various types of medical treatments in which they receive small amounts of radiation, enough to set off radiation detectors such as those that might be used to screen for [...]

Dignified in demeanor, independent in ideology and frequently blue in blood, they were politicians in the mold of Roosevelt and Rockefeller: socially tolerant, environmentally enthusiastic, people who liked government to keep its wallet close to its vest and its hands out of social issues like abortion and, in recent years, same-sex marriage.
But this election dealt [...]