Evolution, Marriage, Uber For Everything, Skyscrapers
Defending Darwin
James Krupa | Slate | 25th March 2015
Lessons learned from teaching evolution at the University of Kentucky, where Darwinism is almost "synonymous with atheism". Evolution comes at the start of the biology course for non-majors; "most semesters, a significant number of students abruptly leave as soon as they realise the topic is human evolution". The confusion begins with the words theory of evolution. Students assume "theory" means "guesswork" (2,200 words)
The Decline Of Marriage
Matthew Yglesias | Vox | 25th March 2015
It's the wrong thing for the right reason. "To explain a social crisis, you first have to establish that a crisis is occurring. There is no major dimension on which American children are doing worse in 2015 than they were in 1975. That should be a huge giveaway that the decline of marriage is a consequence of something good — prosperity, especially for women — rather than a cause or a consequence of something bad" (1,260 words)
Uber For Everything
John Gapper | Financial Times | 26th March 2015 | | Read with 1Pass
Tech companies are eating the world; because if you own the technology for an industry, then you can own the industry too, or at least its customers. Uber wrote the playbook with its conquest of the taxi market. Tesla built a car from the tech outwards. Facebook's bid to host content from mainstream publishers may be the shrewdest gambit since Microsoft put its operating system on to IBM personal computers (826 words)
The Mile-High Building
Justin Davidson | New York | 24th March 2015
Building a mile-high skyscraper, twice the height of the Burj Khalifa, should present no fundamental technical problems if a developer has the money and permissions and hubris to want such a thing. It would "most likely be a cheerleading squad of three or four towers standing hip to hip with a skinny companion on their shoulders". A two-mile-high skyscraper would take some work, though: The lifts would be hell on the sinuses (2,520 words)
Video of the day: Reinvention Of Normal
What to expect: Documentary portrait of Dominic Wilcox, dadaist inventor (7'43")
Thought for the day
Leadership is the art of getting people to follow you when they don't have to
Chris Dillow (http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2013/08/camerons-tragic-failure.html)