From his column in the New York Times today:
Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways…. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953
A calf’s head, which will be boiled for five hours with vegetables.
(via Letter From Paris - A Feast of Organ Meats - NYTimes.com)
Jamie Moyer is either a really old baseball player and nice guy, or he’s a serial killer.
The Sporting Scene: How You Know David Brooks Doesn’t Watch Sports
It’s scary from one angle, and awesome from another. A lot of people like being told what to do, to buy, etc.
rtnt:
How Target Knows You’re Pregnant
Writing for The New York Times, Charles Duhigg examines how retailers collect your data and, using the science of habit formation, analyze it to make a profit:
About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Whoa. Whoa. WHOA.
Without editors planning assignments and copy editors fixing mistakes, reporters quickly deteriorate into Underwear Guys writing blogs from their den.
George Vecsey tells good stories, reflects wisely on newspapers’ nadir, then slags bloggers. Sigh.
But the intensity of the derision strikes me as unwarranted, in that it outdoes anything directed at, say, the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, accused repeatedly of sexual assault, or other players actually convicted of burglary, gun possession and other crimes. In a league full of blithe felons, Tebow and his oppressive piety don’t seem like such horrendous affronts at all.
Frank Bruni, correctly pointing out that the well-meaning zealot, though we may find him unbearable, is usually better than the creepy maybe-rapist.
Dan Wheldon, RIP. Along with boxing, auto racing remains alternately thrilling and sorrowful for the same reason: They are the mainstream sports whose very competition is closest to the gladiators, or to war.
(via New York Times/Getty Images)
Alec Baldwin’s New York Times Magazine cover
Is it just me, or does his pose scream for a cigarette? Not trying to corrupt the kids, but…
You have these people who work for you, but they’re also people. They have families and people in their family get cancer and die, and there’s a lot of being there for people. That was not something I had anticipated.
Bill Keller, soon-to-be-ex-executive editor of The New York Times.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bill-keller-leaving-the-times-5851163#ixzz1OB4zbIYA
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bill-keller-leaving-the-times-5851163#ixzz1OB4zbIYA
It’ll be mostly high-school kids and people who are out of work.
"Partial meltdown" and "meltdown": There's a difference we're going to need to know
“The difference between a partial meltdown and a full meltdown at a nuclear plant is enormous, both in the degree of damage and in the potential release of radiation, experts in nuclear power said.” ~ The New York Times
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My name is 
