Report from pepper-eating contest in Nagaland, India, home of world’s hottest chillies. Here’s what happens to a man who eats five: “Zozam rolls onto his back, arms splayed and palms up. He’s making sounds that are hard to transcribe. Mostly vowels. After a minute he rolls back onto his side and raises his head to retch. A doctor prepares a hypodermic of dicyclomine”. The winner eats 14, and doesn’t feel too well either
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An inspired howl against the complexity of the American tax system. Millions of words. A labyrinth. “It is just not healthy for so many Americans to spend so much of their lives being so furtive”. Compare the Hong Kong system: “The authorities would mail you a letter telling you to pay 15 per cent of your salary and you would send them a cheque for the money. The taxman got his money and you had the rest of your day” (Metered paywall)
(797 words)
Big profile of Jerry Brown, and of the state of California. He comes out of it well — modest, inquiring, a fixer. The state is, as it were, another story. “What is weakest about America — the squabbling paralysis of the governing structures, the relentless pressure on the middle class, the steady decline of public schools, roads, parks and the simultaneous rise of the public-security state — is weaker and worse in California”
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You too, eh? You read a book, and, a couple of years later, you’ve not only forgotten the substance of the story, but even the act of having read it. It’s not that I thought I was the only one; but I thought I was especially unretentive. Now I have my benchmark. “The spines look familiar. But for the most part, the assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and discarded represent a vast catalog of forgetting”
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Book extract. Argues that we have three modes of thinking — in pictures, in words, in patterns. In tech, you need all three, and you do need a balance between them, but above all you need the pattern thinking. That’s what chess players have. What Steve Jobs had. What the best coders have. And also what people with autism often have. Seeing patterns helps you to grasp structures and spot mistakes quickly
(1,580 words)
How to attend (if not necessarily enjoy) a British football match. Brits: Cut out and keep for foreign visitors. “It will be noisier than you are used to. Emotions will be higher than they are at home. The food will be awful. People will be drunk. The weather will be bad. Many of the supporters will not appear to be having fun, and will be expressing their feelings in novel combinations of swear words” (Metered paywall)
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Perl is so skilled at deriding bad art that I sometimes forget how well he writes of art he loves. As here. “Rarely have life’s sweetness and bitterness been embraced with more evenhanded genius than in the work of Jacques Callot. The seventeenth-century French printmaker finds an ethics of vision—a way of grappling with whatever the world has to offer—in the indomitable force and lucidity of his line”
(3,570 words)
Review of
Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin. “His argument from science and history is as provocative, original, and unsettling as any I’ve read in years. It turns upside-down the now standard view of Wells, Minkowski, and Einstein. It contravenes our intellectual inheritance from Newton and, for that matter, Plato, and it will ring false to many of Smolin’s contemporaries in theoretical physics.” Sounds promising, no?
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Really rather amazing account of London killing from first-aider who happened to be passing on a bus, saw the aftermath, tried to help the victim, engaged the attackers in conversation until police arrived, then got back on her bus. “At first there was no blood by the body but as I talked to the man it began to flow which worried me because blood needs a beating heart to flow. But I didn’t want to annoy the man by going back to the body”
(780 words)
Fundamental problem solved by little-known researcher “whose talents had been so overlooked after he earned his doctorate that he found it difficult to get an academic job, working for several years as an accountant and in a Subway sandwich shop”. Yitang Zhang’s paper proves that “there is some number N smaller than 70 million such that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by N”. Here’s how he did it
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On the nouning and adverbing of adjectives. It’s OK. “Advertisers love to push at the edges of taste in language. If this slogan — ‘Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should’ — from 1954, doesn’t bother you, you’re like most modern folks. But every educated Anglophone knew, when this came out, that ‘like’ couldn’t be used as a conjunction, and that this should be ‘Tastes good, as a cigarette should’”
(730 words)
Short, pithy, packed with more wisdom than you find in bloviations ten times the length. If you are a State Department spokesman, asked what you think about exclusion of women from Iran’s presidential elections, here’s what you say. Condemn the exclusion, amplify the reasons, leave open the option of working with the winner. “Simple, clear, principled and flexible. Always the best combination. It’s called diplomacy”
(413 words)
To JP Morgan and its admirers, a lot. He runs a huge bank probably as well as any human could. To his detractors, he’s key-person risk writ large. “If I were a conspiracy theorist I might even suspect that all the fuss about Dimon is supposed to make us ‘watch the birdie’. A distraction from the real point, which is how we structure a financial system that serves the needs of consumers and businesses in as safe a way as possible”
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More on life, death, and longevity. Humans find it hard to distinguish between quality of life and length of life, at least when it comes to their own. They may have a view on highly invasive end-of-life care, other than which, they tend to conflate quantity of life with quality. In which case, how about a proxy? What does your choice of pet say about you? Do you want a poodle, or a miniature poodle?
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Why George Packer is wrong to see the tycoons of Silicon Valley as a “libertarian geek oligarchy”. Silicon Valley succeeds because it tries hard to find progressive ways of creating wealth. Founders get to be billionaires; but tens of thousands of managers become millionaires from share options; and waged workers get better conditions, and a bigger share of profits, than in most other parts of American industry
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A recommendation for this note in particular, but also for this new website in general, which promises summaries and discussions of recent economic research. This account of a 2011 academic paper confirms that there was a general food surplus in China in the famine years of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The problems were entirely in food distribution, where Maoism fostered chaos, perverse incentives, lying, waste, and hoarding
(1,015 words)
We pretty much understand the broad outlines of the financial crisis in Europe. Banks over-borrowed and over-lent. States bailed them out. Which left governments grappling with rocketing debt ratios. The puzzle is why leaders think public spending cuts are the right response, when all they have done is to make things worse. “It’s all quite mad, but that doesn’t mean it will end anytime soon”. Short of a revolution
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“Close up, he smells of tobacco, offset with a liberal application of aftershave.” Out and about with Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party, steering Britain towards an exit from the EU. “Ukip is indeed a rag tag bag — but not of fruitcakes; rather, of cussed, contrary, wilful, protesting, obstreperous, bantering Englishmen and women, the like of which have been with us all the way back to
The Canterbury Tales”
(3,699 words)
