Megan McArdle examines data mining, a practice that could offer benefits both medical and financial:
If we could develop more-comprehensive medical records, and collect that data in some central location, data mining might detect patterns in disease and treatment that we now discover only through painful trial and error. More than that, it could finally allow us to reach the holy grail of health-care wonks: paying for wellness rather than for doctors’ visits and procedures.
Patrick at Palingates pores over the latest evidence from the phone-hacking trial of David Kernell:
With this post I want to highlight one fact in particular which has been proven over and over again: That the Palins will go out of their way to make themselves appear as victims and at the same time make the actions of the "other side" appear as horrible as possible. In addition, the Palins will not hesitate to tell smaller and bigger lies in order to achieve this goal.
"It's definitely one big cable buy. When Governor Romney was talking about running for president, he had sent out a DVD where he was sledding in Utah with the family, talking about whether he would run or not, and everybody was baking cookies and hanging out. The difference is she has a production company willing to foot the bill for it," – Terry Sullivan, a GOP strategist, on Palin's reality show.
Jack Shafer argues that against all odds, the Beastweek merger may work:
Tina Brown possesses more moxie, daring, shrewdness, and big-top showmanship than any editor of the last half-century. Compared with Brown, Jann Wenner is a second-string maracas player; Hugh Hefner a prude; Graydon Carter a big, dumb forehead; Louis Rossetto a KayPro; Andre Laguerre* a minor leaguer; and Harold Hayes a William Shawn. What editor in the history of magazines has set three titles on absolute fire? Brown did just that with Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, before, um, burning down her heavily bankrolled (by vanity press mogul Harvey Weinstein) fin de siècle monthly Talk…
Yesterday, nobody cared squat about Newsweek. Today, the press is filled with jabber and curiosity about a magazine most of us had given up for dead.
His advice:
While I'm not suggesting that Brown turn Newsweek into the Journal of Brangelina Studies, I'd encourage her to rely on the high-low culture mix that made The New Yorker so damnably interesting during her run—and take it even lower. Readers will follow, even if Time won't.
Speaking of Time, which competes in Newsweek's space, Brown should never aspire to be like it, or the other newsweeklies, the Economist and the Week. We don't need another Time, Economist, or the Week because we already have one of each. Let Newsweek separate itself from the pack by becoming more combative, more outrageous, more judgmental, and more wicked than the others. Violate the orthodoxy! Totally de-Meachamize it! On Week 1, piss off the White House. Week 2, the Pentagon. Week 3, Wall Street. Then the unions, Harvard, religion, life-insurance agents, the green movement, and so on until the bottom is reached with an exposé of Little League baseball. Then repeat. According to H.L. Mencken, "The liberation of the human mind has been best furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries. …" I want, very much, for Tina Brown to be that sort of cat-slinger.
New York, New York, 5.30 pm
PJ O’Rourke explains why:
We will win an election when all the seats in the House and Senate and the chair behind the desk in the Oval Office and the whole bench of the Supreme Court are filled with people who wish they weren’t there.
In a free country government is a dull and onerous responsibility. It is a parent-teacher conference. The teacher is a pompous twit. Our child is a lazy pain in the ass. We undertake this social obligation with weary reluctance. And we only do it at all because the teacher (political authority) deserves cold stares, hard questions, and maybe firing, and the pupil (that portion of society which, alas, needs governing) deserves to be grounded without TV and have its Internet access screened and its allowance docked.
Barry Eichengreen looks back at an exhausted post-WWII Britain and sees a lesson for the US today:
[Britain] failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930’s. Its political parties, rather than working together to address pressing economic problems, remained at each other’s throats. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable.
In short, Britain’s was a political, not an economic, failure. And that history, unfortunately, is all too pertinent to America’s fate.
Jason F. wants to teach this class:
It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.
I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.
Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors.
An urban timelapse with punch:
New York City – Timelapse from stimul on Vimeo.
The Dish 