With Silicon Valley back on top of the world, it's time to point out a bit of unwelcome history. There are two competing narratives about the technology hub's origins: "¢ The famous tale of how William Shockley's obnoxious management style led to start-up silicon chipmakers such as ...
Every Fourth of July, a heretical question nags: Would it have been so bad if America hadn"t won its independence from Britain? This is not a popular topic among Americans, who invest everything about independence with transcendent import. We"re not happy merely saying that the Revolution ...
One of the biggest changes of my lifetime has been the decline in the speed of social change. Today it's easy to agree with Ecclesiastes that "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun." Yet that was once heresy. In high school, ...
The struggles of even the best-connected California celebrities to nail down every last one of the permits they need to build on their own property helps demonstrate why differences in topography drive Californians toward voting for environmentalist Democrats and Texans toward pro-business ...
You probably haven"t heard of Get the Gringo, a recent Lethal Weapon-like action movie starring Mel Gibson and directed by his right-hand man Adrian Grunberg. Mad Mel plays Driver, an American criminal who makes a run for the border, only to wind up in one of those Beyond Thunderdome-like ...
To anybody who saw Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a child, Pythagoras's 2,500-year-old intuition that astronomy and music must be intertwined seems self-evident. The opening minute of 2001 is set to the thunderous "Sunrise" sequence of Also sprach Zarathustra, Richard ...
MIT's Daron Acemoglu is a rock star among economists, one of the ten most cited in his profession. This is largely because of the paper the Istanbul-born Armenian cowrote in 2001: The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development. Other economists have found that it provides a suave way to finally ...
In his impressive first book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society, entrepreneur/intellectual Jim Manzi has the makings of an airport best seller in the genre of Steven Levitt's Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink. Indeed, Uncontrolled is ...
The Dictator is Sacha Baron Cohen's fourth and"surprisingly"funniest movie, a definite improvement over his biggest hit Borat. But critics, who raved in 2006 about how Borat exposed the anti-Semitism throbbing in Red State America's heart, are now having second thoughts about Baron Cohen's ...
In Tom Stoppard's 1982 drama The Real Thing, a middle-aged playwright and his daughter discuss Elvis Presley's death: Henry: I never went for him much. "All Shook Up" was the last good one. However, I suppose that's the fate of all us artists. Debbie: Death? Henry: People saying they ...
