Category: Bookmark
May 5, 2018
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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Has a Game Plan
In an age of cord cutting, constant distraction, and rapidly changing media and sports habits, professional basketball has bucked many trends. Television ratings are up by double digits so far this season, and attendance has set records for four years straight. Relations with the players’ union are relatively placid. NBA players compete with global soccer stars for the largest social media followings.
May 4, 2018
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I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye
Glenn Harvey I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely seven years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
May 3, 2018
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An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons
I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick writeup of its main points, and why it’s been so transformative to my thinking.
Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she won a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. She argues that current game theory doesn’t explain why some commons are, in fact, sustainably managed.
April 30, 2018
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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver Has a Game Plan
Photograph courtesy of the National Basketball Association Adam Silver is one of the longest-tenured team members in the National Basketball Association. But he doesn’t spend much time on the court. In more than 26 years, Silver, who briefly practiced law before joining the league in 1992, worked…
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An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons – Nadia Eghbal – Medium
I recently read Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons and have been evangelizing it so enthusiastically that I figured I’d do a quick writeup of its main points, and why it’s been so transformative to my thinking. Elinor Ostrom’s work deals with common pool resource (CPR) management, for which she…
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The Good Room
This talk was given on February 15, 2017 at Substans in Bergen, Norway. I’m a designer, but writing is another important part of my practice. Most of what I’ve written focuses on making the case for a cohesive and generous philosophy for how we design technology: it must not only look good and feel…
April 27, 2018
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The Surprising History of the Infographic
As the 2016 election approaches, we’re hearing a lot about “red states” and “blue states.” That idiom has become so ingrained that we’ve almost forgotten where it originally came from: a data visualization. In the 2000 presidential election, the race between Al Gore and George W. Bush was so razor…
April 26, 2018
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The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny
Hulu The Handmaid’s Tale is a difficult show to appreciate right now. After following the plot of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 book in its first season, its second…
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A Smorgasbord of Solutions for Global Warming
Opinion Thinking about Earth Day, I did a Google search for “global warming solutions.” Up popped a slew of “what you can do” lists from leading scientific and…
April 25, 2018
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The Rise in Self-Proclaimed Time Travelers
In the year 2000, a time traveler reportedly walked among us. He was from the year 2038, but he drove a 1967 Chevy Corvette. His sweet time ride disrupted…
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It’s official! Wordnik is now a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit!
You may remember when we first announced we had started the process of becoming a not-for-profit corporation, with the mission of collecting and sharing data…
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Opinion | Sometimes a Broken Glass Is Just a Broken Glass
It is tempting to think that a work of great art appears in the material world complete and perfectly formed, like a rainbow or an egg, that every note or…
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The future of mobility will be multi-modal, shared and zero emission.
This interview is published in The Beam #5 — Subscribe now for more on the topic
Robin Chase is a transportation entrepreneur who became famous for co-founding… -
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The Cult Brand Whisperer Behind Casper, Allbirds, And Birchbox
In 2013, the patent for finasteride, the active ingredient in male-pattern-baldness medication Propecia, expired. This might seem an unlikely development to…
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Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?
A look at the available evidence
It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.
Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space… -
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Review: Beyoncé Is Bigger Than Coachella
INDIO, Calif. — Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician…
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Beyoncé’s Triumphant Homecoming at Coachella
Beyoncé’s Coachella performance, her most comprehensive retrospective to date, underscored not only her Southernness but the global black vernacular that…
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The Myth of “Real” America Just Won’t Go Away
Watching the film Phantom Thread , I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people…
April 24, 2018
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Selling Politics Like a Lifestyle Brand
There’s a small stack of Planned Parenthood T-shirts in Rebecca Davis’s closet, each one acquired at a volunteer event with the organization. Davis is a…
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The Odds of That
When the Miami Police first found Benito Que, he was slumped on a desolate side street, near the empty spot where he had habitually parked his Ford Explorer. At about the same time, Don C. Wiley mysteriously disappeared. His car, a white rented Mitsubishi Galant, was abandoned on a bridge outside of…
April 21, 2018
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In a broken world: Towards an ethics of repair in the Anthropocene – Duncan P McLaren, 2018
Introduction Section: Both materially and discursively, the Anthropocene is redefining humanity’s relationship with the Earth, positioning humans not only as a…
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“2001: A Space Odyssey”: What It Means, and How It Was Made
The power of Stanley Kubrick’s classic is bound up with the story of its making. Photograph from Photofest Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature… -
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Wikimedia Foundation receives $3 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make freely licensed images accessible and reusable across the web – Wikimedia Blog
Photo by Ajepbah, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE . The Wikimedia Foundation, with a US$3,015,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation , is leading an effort to enable… -
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The Conquest of Climate
by Will Boisvert How bad will climate change be? Not very. No, this isn’t a denialist screed. Human greenhouse emissions will warm the planet, raise the seas and derange the weather, and the resulting heat, flood and drought will be cataclysmic. Cataclysmic—but not apocalyptic. While the climate…
April 18, 2018
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Raised by Wolves
The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved by Raymond Pierotti and Brandy R. Fogg How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Lyudmila Trut Michal Rovner: Night-7 , 2016. Rovner’s work is on view in…
April 15, 2018
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An Older Origin for Complex Human Cultures
When Rick Potts started digging at Olorgesailie, the now-dry basin of an ancient Kenyan lake, he figured that it would take three years to find everything there was to find. That was in 1985, and Potts is now leading his fourth decade of excavation. It’s a good thing he stayed. In recent years, his…
April 12, 2018
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America’s Loneliest Roads, Mapped
Screenshot/Geotab Linda Poon Mar 19, 2018 An interactive map highlights the least traveled routes in the country—and some of the most scenic. Among road-trip enthusiasts, the Alaska Highway is a favorite. It runs more than 1,300 miles, dazzling travelers with tundras and sightings of eagles,…
April 9, 2018
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Machines reading the archive: handwritten text recognition software
Any researcher who has used online newspaper archives, repositories of digitised books or even resources like The National Archives’ Cabinet Papers Online will recognise the revolution created by optical character recognition (OCR) technology. It is this technology which enables us to search not…
April 6, 2018
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Tending the Digital Commons: A Small Ethics toward the Future
The Hedgehog Review : Vol. 20 No. 1 (Spring 2018) Alan Jacobs The Hedgehog Review: Spring 2018 (Volume 20 | Issue 1) Issue TOC >> Print Article >> Subscribe >> F acebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would…
April 3, 2018
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Back to the Blog
One of the most-read pieces I’ve written here remains my entreaty “ Professors Start Your Blogs ,” which is now 12 years old but might as well have been written in the Victorian age. It’s quaint. In 2006, many academics viewed blogs through the lens of LiveJournal and other teen-oriented,…