Category: issues

Benjamin Schwarz: “Most men hold charm in vague suspicion: few cultivate it; still fewer respond to it; hardly any know whether they have it; and almost none can even identify it. … Americans, especially American men, have always been, for some very good reasons, ambivalent about charm.”

“They did things that impulsive do-it-yourselfers are not supposed to do: they made a budget (albeit, on a piece of salvaged sheetrock), found investors and spent more than $150,000 on interior construction.”

“This is an open invitation to a back-room deal and to wholesale compromise of the sort that has made what should be a showcase gateway for the city into a blight and a safety hazard. What the city deserves is a new, safer, up-to-the-minute station and the next Madison Square Garden.”

“Collecting such remains in pursuit of scientific knowledge once went unchallenged, but now institutions face the quandary of how to display Egyptian mummies in a respectful fashion. What is the purpose of displaying shrunken heads or tattooed Maori skulls or bone flutes? And should curators return remains that have been transformed into works of folk art?”

“Is art school the next B-school? Hardly, though artists often possess the skills and temperament that business leaders regularly say are in short supply: creativity, resiliency, flexibility, high tolerance for risk and ambiguity, as well as the courage to fail.”

Hugo Schwyzer: “The questions that self-pleasure raises are foundational: to whom do our bodies belong? What is sex for? Tell me how you really feel about masturbation, and I can more or less predict how you’ll feel about the more frequently debated ‘sex war’ issues.”

“The report cites teens’ dislike for over-sharing and stressful “drama” on the social network. Teens also don’t like the fact that more and more adults are joining Facebook, although Pew found that 7 in 10 teens are Facebook friends with their parents.”

“Is there another way to provide affordable education to poor people on a giant scale Bridge is betting that there is — in fact, its business and academic models are based on scale.”

The Come Out Festival, which opens this week, has been taking place in Adelaide, Australia for four decades. But when Shona Benson asked around the city, she got fond-but-vague memories from adults and blank stares from teenagers (who showed interest once she filled them in, and obvious tie-ins in the national media have been going unmade. What gives?

“So what explains the privacy paradox? Teens care about privacy in a social context, not a big data context. That teens are fleeing Facebook is illustrative of the phenomenon.”