Yesterday, this almost brand spanking new blog drew nearly 5,000 page views, thanks in large part to a link from slashdot.org to a data mining in the public interest post. So thanks, slashdot folks; you continue to curate a fascinating site for a huge audience. Also, thanks to Jim Romenesko, the best journalistic blogger in the country, who linked to the Huffington Post Union Bloggers item today. Then again, thanks to the WordPress operation, which put this humble blog on its fastest-growing and best-post lists recently, also helping to spin the digital turnstyles. But mostly, thanks to all of you gentle readers, who accelerate those turnstyles every time you click over here, or tell a friend he or she might want to.
Thanks, folks
Filed under Uncategorized
A David Brooks column actually worth reading
When you have a David Brooks column 
that is not as obvious as a cloudless sky is blue — a column that even puts forward a reasonable and original thought — you must go with it.
Filed under Uncategorized
We hate the Huffington Post so much we put it in our name
Now here’s an interesting but strange phenomenon: The Huffington Post Union of Bloggers, a site composed of multiple blogs, arranged by subject area in a way that’s reminiscent of some other amalgamation of blogs headed up by a silver-tongued Greek woman. No, this is not the Huffington Post, but a new entity formed in the wake of a class action lawsuit filed against The Huffington Post.com, Inc., Huffington Post owner Arianna Huffington, and her co-owner, AOL.com, Inc., “alleging that thousands of writers and other content providers have been wrongly denied any compensation for the substantial value they created for the Huffington Post.” The new HPUB is a nonprofit that’s “affiliated” in some unstated way with Local 1981 of the National Writers Union; its directors and members are “[c]urrent and former bloggers and employees of the Huffington Post and their supporters. Their names are confidential.” There are seeming positives here, according to the site’s answers to frequently asked questions: HPUB is dedicated to “quality original and reprinted material that reflects our Progressive values and vision of change.” It doesn’t look like any of the bloggers on the site are getting paid right now, but “[t]he Union is working on a business model to pay contributors,” which is a good thing, as long as the Union works fast. Of course, I’m also compelled to state the obvious here: Most people work out the business plan before they start the business. And the secrecy thing is really hokey and smells of the kind of lefty conspiratorialism that tends to be death to any attempt to create a practical business. (I mean: If this nonprofit is looking for the tax exemption that will allow people to contribute tax free, it will have to say who its directors are, and fairly soon. Why not now?) And using the Huffington Post in the new publication’s name is not exactly helping you build a brand, if you actually expect this thing to fly. You may think you’re sticking it to the woman. Actually, you’re giving her free advertising.
Still, I’m not here just to carp, but also to serve. If anyone has a great blog and likes what HPUB’s up to, it is now accepting new submissions, according to a LinkedIn discussion posting.
Lebron James can’t shoot a mid-range jumper, folks
I’m enjoying all the psychologizing about Lebron James today, mostly because it’s beside the point. Lebron James did, indeed, fail to take over the Miami Heat’s final game against the now NBA champion Dallas Mavericks (and gosh does it feel strange to type that clause). In fact, he failed to lead his team throughout the series. But the failure wasn’t psychological; the failure was in his game, which has gaping holes that his size and athletic ability have tended to obscure. If you go to the NBA.com StatsCube, you’ll find a graphic on the lower right that shows James shoots 68 percent in “the restricted area” near the rim — that is, even when you count all his dunks, he only shoots 68 percent from three feet or less. But that’s not my point; if you look at his shooting from other segments of the court, you’ll see that Lebron shot all of 37 percent from mid range in the finals — worse than he shot on corner three-point attempts.
And that’s one of the largest holes in Lebron James’ game: He can’t really drive by someone, pull up for a 14-foot jumper and make it. He can hit the three. He can drive all the way to the hole and cram. But he can’t really get his own shot, if you cheat other defenders toward him so he can’t steamroller his man and go all the way to the rim and a thundering dunk. The Mavs took advantage of that weakness, and now so will every other team, until and unless Lebron spends a summer with D-Wade, learning how to create in the mid range.
Filed under NBA
Should presidential candidates be given a psychopath test?
Psychopaths constitute only a tiny percentage of humans but disproportionately occupy positions of political and financial power. For that stunning and I’m sure hard-won insight, this book (“The Psychopath Test,” by Jon Ronson) wins the 2011 Statement of Obvious Banality award. But the book does raise 
an interesting question: Is there a way to require or pressure major federal and state political candidates — for president, Congress, governor, etc. — to take a personality inventory that would reveal psychopath/sociopath tendencies? I realize the mere suggestion of such a requirement has all sorts of civil liberties implications, and the political hurdles may be all but insurmountable. (I’d love to see the congressional debate about such a bill on CSPAN, though.) But those difficulties are part of the reason I find the question/suggestion interesting. Society has a clear interest in not electing a true psychopath president; presidential candidates, on the other hand, don’t lose all privacy rights, just for wanting the world’s most powerful position and 24/7 access to the football that could launch thermonuclear Armageddon. But do they retain the right to conceal psychopathy, an almost total lack of empathy manifested by the absence of what most people call a conscience, often hidden by high intelligence and a winning personality? This thought experiment is now in your court.
Filed under politics, presidents, psycopathy
More journalistic data mining in the public interest
When you have Associated Press nerd-journalist extraordinaire Jonathan Stray giving 
a brilliant explanation of the use of data-mining strategies to wring the sense out of massive numbers of documents — such as the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs released by Wikileaks — you go with it. And I do mean brilliant. Every investigative reporter in America ought to listen to all 19+ minutes of this audio-powerpoint presentation. (Big h/t to Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings.)
Filed under data mining, investigative journalism, Wikileaks
Beryl Benderly wins award she deserves
Beryl Benderly is an accomplished book author, a wide-ranging magazine writer, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and, most important, a very nice and decent person.
So I’m happy to note that she and a story she wrote for me when I was editor of Miller-McCune, “The Real Science Gap,” have won the Iris Molotsky Award for Excellence in Coverage of Higher Education, sponsored by the American Association of University Professors. Here’s the nut of the announcement for the AAUP award:
Cat Warren, editor of Academe, presented the award at Saturday’s plenary luncheon, saying, “This is one of those stellar pieces of interpretive journalism that does it all: it garners an enormous number of facts; it takes those facts and gives them a new frame that upends some widely held beliefs. And it does so in a manner that is so graceful that when you reach the end of the piece and realize that it has done the next-to-impossible—change your mind about something—you don’t resent it in the least. You’re grateful.”
Congrats, Beryl. It was a great piece that I’m happy to have been associated with, however inconsequentially.
Wonk summer reading recommendations that aren’t all that wonky
One might suspect that a summer-reading list from something called Foreign Policy would be full of turgid academic announcements of the urgent need for a more forward-looking approach to Moldavia, but then one would come to one’s senses and realize that, no, I was thinking of Foreign Affairs. Anyway, I highly recommend this FP summer books list, which skips back and forth from policy to foreign, and fiction to non-. Its most praiseworthy attribute: The recommenders appear to be trying to show off, so when they recomm
end you read Nabokov, they recommend Laughter in the Dark, which, despite being a Russian literature freak, I had never heard of, much less read. Similarly obscure plugs pop up for Ian McEwan (Black Dogs) and John le Carré (The Secret Pilgrim). And overall, the recommendations, which come from Foreign Policy contributors, which means from very well-read people, are delightfully eclectic. You either have heard of the books (and think yes, I’d intended to get to that) or you have not (and think, sounds interesting, but where in the hell did he ever run into that?).
Filed under academia, books, Foreign policy, summer reading
Vampire-film villainess or future senator? You make the call.
Whenever you have a very scary 1970ish video of Dianne Feinstein
inveighing against pornography, you go with it. Yes, you do. (h/t to the SFist’s brilliant Brock Keeling.)
Filed under absurdity, politics, sex noises
It’s a nice place to visit, but Rome is not America
The oversimplified analogy of America to Rome at its moment of imperial overstretch — paralyzed by its own corruptions and indecision and on the verge of implosion — is at least as old as the mid-70s, when the twinned horrors of Vietnam and Watergate slid into stagflation and malaise. Over at The Dish, Andrew Sullivan allows his readers to retail the idea that the barbarians began climbing the gate during the Clinton administration
, which seems to me a real confusion of appearance and reality. Yes, media coverage of the Clinton administration certainly gave the impression of decadence and inability to take decisive action. But there’s a problem here: The Clinton presidency was on the whole, by any objective measure, the most successful of my now-fairly-long life. The economy soared; average Americans made more money; federal finances were repaired; government was indeed reinvented; and so on and so forth, in a long litany of accomplishments that any Clintonista can recite off the top of his or her head. The notion that the presidency and government as a whole were corrupt and ineffective, because the president allowed an intern to fellate him, is plain wrong. I suspect that in another couple of years, the Rome metaphor will drop from favor, perhaps for decades. There is a transformation underway, from a world economy of manufacturing run by fossil fuels to a global system based on information and alternative energy. The nation that leads the transformation will be the nation that leads in its ability to innovate. As soon as the fiscal overhang from the genuinely corrupt administration of George W. Bush is cleared — and it will be, in one way or another — the enormous advantage in innovation contained in Silicon Valley and other elements of the U.S. research and development complex, from Austin to Raleigh-Durham to Massachusetts and beyond, will show, slowly at first and then increasingly and dramatically. The new century will be solar, computational and American.
Filed under economics
John Mecklin, writer/editor 