Flowing Data captions:
This map from Paramount Studios, produced in 1927, showed investors where movies could shoot, instead of going to the actual places. Does your movie take place in Venice, Italy? No problem, head down to southern California. How about the Mississippi River? Check out the Sacramento River.
A memoir.
John Seabrook recently adopted a girl from Haiti. How adoption narrows the parenting divide:
[One] way adoption differs from birth is that the father is much more of an equal partner from the beginning. When a woman spends nine months pregnant, gains weight, gives up drinking, and then has to go through labor, it places the guy behind the eight ball. The mother has already had a nine-month relationship with the child, and you’re just getting started. After the birth, the father feels that he has to atone for all the sacrifices the mother has already made in carrying the child. That shapes the dynamic of early parenthood, and as a guy you feel like you’re playing catch-up. But when you adopt a child, you’re starting from the same place on the moment the child arrives.
“We were young, good-looking and stupid. Now we’re just stupid,” – Mick Jagger looking back on his past (translated from his flawless French).
Eric Rauchway pegs the downfall of Democratic party federalism and Republican big government to the New Deal and American expansion.
The generic House ballot (sans Rasmussen):
Development expert William Easterly rides the lecture circuit:
I feel kind of like I am on a long personal intellectual journey trying to figure out how to reconcile my compassion for the world’s poor with my painfully honest realization that there is no reliable evidence on exactly what to do to end poverty. Each new public lecture is trying out a solution to the conundrum on a smart audience, and then they educate me some more to take the next step (which will be tried in the next lecture).
I am trying to convince people that rigorous skepticism is a creative force because most of the damage is done by overconfident people who thought they knew the answer when they didn’t.
Hale Stewart crunches some numbers:
As a result of the increase in initial unemployment claims, the decrease in the euro and the decrease in the index of leading economic indicators, caution is warranted going forward.
TED passes along a wonderful talk about idealism and the potential of the human race:
In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers a powerful message about the human search for meaning…
The Dish 