Gawker Explains The Absurd Awfulness Of The New York Times

Perfectly on point:

See, the secret of the Style section is that it’s intended for two audiences. The first audience is its “official,” explicit audience: people who see nothing problematic with being told by The New York Times what’s cool, and think of the Style section is a straight-ahead, unironic record of hip trends and cool people. This is the audience that most people imagine when they okay a Style section profile.

But then there is the second, “secret” audience: everyone else. This audience, of which you are a member, is both mesmerized and repelled by the Style section. Its reaction, week after week, is “what the fuck is wrong with rich people?” To the secret audience, the Style section is full of dispatches from a different universe; a universe where some of the most horrible and insufferable people on the planet are treated as visionaries and geniuses. A rich universe.

The Earth At Seven Billion

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Understanding The Mind To Achieve Peace

The Article: Human Nature’s Pathologist by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times.

The Text: Steven Pinker was a 15-year-old anarchist. He didn’t think people needed a police force to keep the peace. Governments caused the very problems they were supposed to solve.

Besides, it was 1969, said Dr. Pinker, who is now a 57-year-old psychologist at Harvard. “If you weren’t an anarchist,” he said, “you couldn’t get a date.”

At the dinner table, he argued with his parents about human nature. “They said, ‘What would happen if there were no police?’ ” he recalled. “I said: ‘What would we do? Would we rob banks? Of course not. Police make no difference.’ ”

This was in Montreal, “a city that prided itself on civility and low rates of crime,” he said. Then, on Oct. 17, 1969, police officers and firefighters went on strike, and he had a chance to test his first hypothesis about human nature.

“All hell broke loose,” Dr. Pinker recalled. “Within a few hours there was looting. There were riots. There was arson. There were two murders. And this was in the morning that they called the strike.”

The ’60s changed the lives of many people and, in Dr. Pinker’s case, left him deeply curious about how humans work. That curiosity turned into a career as a leading expert on language, and then as a leading advocate of evolutionary psychology. In a series of best-selling books, he has argued that our mental faculties — from emotions to decision-making to visual cognition — were forged by natural selection.

He has also become a withering critic of those who would deny the deep marks of evolution on our minds — social engineers who believe they can remake children as they wish, modernist architects who believe they can rebuild cities as utopias. Even in the 21st century, Dr. Pinker argues, we ignore our evolved brains at our own peril.

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The Profound, Unabashed Hypocrisy Of OWS Criticism

Three Odd Things They Should Teach With A Homeland Security Degree

A homeland security degree has to prepare you for a lot of things, though coincidentally a big part of the curriculum is “everything not on the curriculum.” You have to expect the unexpected and then – and this is the important bit – deal with it in a sensible way. The whole point of a homeland security degree is to be a useful human being in a security or crisis situation, and that’s a lot more difficult than you might think.

But even a Time Lord with extra training by MI5 and GI Joe couldn’t have expected some of the crazy things that happen in the real world. That’s why we’ve found some extra things you need to watch out for with a homeland security degree.

Karma

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