The Book Bench: Online Only: The New Yorker

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The Book Bench: Online Only: The New Yorker

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John Hodgman talks to The New Yorker about his writing process. It includes a notebook and of course a Mac...

Actual ideas come away from the desk, typically. While walking through the park or talking aloud in the shower. When water damage is not at issue, I will carry an actual Moleskine with me, because they are very handy, with their nice stiff backs, and I am a cliché.

This Math Whiz Called It for Obama Months Ago - NYTimes.com

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This Math Whiz Called It for Obama Months Ago - NYTimes.com. The New York Times profiles Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com. Is interesting to think about how his site and work caught on with people as the election moved from the primaries to the general election. This election was kind of a coming out party for the power of social networks and the use of the net as a vehicle for political discussion and organization.

Legacies: Class Report: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

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Legacies: Class Report: The Talk of the Town: The New Yorker

Shared by timlauer
Roger Angell reflects on the events of Tuesday night and thinks of an old college classmate...

He died in 1975, at the age of fifty-three. He and I belong to what has sometimes been called “the Greatest Generation.” If most of us have felt uncomfortable about the honor, it may be because we’ve known that in some ways we haven’t been all that great. The election of Barack Obama as President could mean that all of us in the United States belong to the Greatest Generation now, and though this astounding event seems to have happened all of a sudden, for some people my age it wasn’t soon enough.

Reading...Better Teachers Needed

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Better Teachers Needed

Ed Glaeser does excellent economics work that often translates into puzzlingly disappointing op-eds, but this column on the vital importance teacher quality and offering a few ideas about how to get it is spot-on. President-Elect Obama has often spoken along the same lines as Glaeser in terms of paying teachers more, and then screening out ineffective ones more rigorously. Obviously, the devil is in the details, but it’s very important for the long-run fate of the economy to see some movement on this.