Philip Tetlock’s Tomorrows. The Mystery of Marriage. My husband and I got married last fall because we wanted to have a party.
I doubt our friends, our family, or anybody else we know would have been surprised if we’d never done it at all: if we had continued living together, loving each other, one day having children, all without exchanging rings. The wedding was ideal—great cake, accessible by subway—but our life didn’t change after it was over. Welcome to Forbes. Learning how to live. Illustration: Magnet Reps.
Stop what you’re doing. I don’t mean stop reading this, or whatever you’re doing while you’re reading (brushing your teeth, eating, waiting for the water to boil). I mean consider the possibility of stopping whatever your answer is to the conversational gambit, “And what do you do?” Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney.
Photo. Why Too Much Data Disables Your Decision Making. Quick, think back to a major decision.
Finding 'Life, Death And Hope' In A Mumbai Slum. Next to Mumbai's bustling international airport, a boy picks through refuse, looking for pieces he can recycle and sell to support his family of 11.
He is a resident of Annawadi, a slum built on a patch of reclaimed swampland — now fringed by luxury hotels. As economists and activists fret over increasing income inequality in America, scenes like this one from journalist Katherine Boo's new book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, are a forceful reminder of the extreme disparity of wealth that exist all over the world — and what people must do to survive. Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who earned acclaim for her pieces on poverty in America, became a regular visitor to Mumbai after she married a man from India. Slum Children’s Capacity to Aspire – Policy Lessons.
In my previous post, I presented my initial thoughts after reading Katherine Boo’s recent book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity”.
I have maintained an active academic and professional interest in public interventions related to urban poverty and slums in cities of the South ever since my undergraduate days in India. Katherine Boo’s book was therefore more than of mere sentimental value to me. I found it a rich source of information on a number of policy arenas – corruption, urban poverty, urban land and labor markets, electoral politics, education, public health, policing, slum resettlement, rural-to-urban migration – just to name a few. Q&A with Katherine Boo, Author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Bill Gates: How did you pick the particular slum and the people that you profiled in the book?
Katherine Boo: Although I’d been spending time in slums all over Mumbai, I kept gravitating to Annawadi because of the hope there. In 2008, preventable disease was rampant and only six of 3,000 residents had permanent work, but the place was still frantic with the optimism and entrepreneurial energy you noted in your review. Special guest post: Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China's workers. The Science of Loneliness: How Isolation Can Kill You. Sometime in the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sat down to write an essay about a subject that had been mostly overlooked by other psychoanalysts up to that point.
Even Freud had only touched on it in passing. She was not sure, she wrote, “what inner forces” made her struggle with the problem of loneliness, though she had a notion. It might have been the young female catatonic patient who began to communicate only when Fromm-Reichmann asked her how lonely she was. “She raised her hand with her thumb lifted, the other four fingers bent toward her palm,” Fromm-Reichmann wrote. The thumb stood alone, “isolated from the four hidden fingers.” Aaron Swartz: howtoget. Talk, as prepared, for the Tathva 2007 computer conference at NIT Calicut.
(Additional notes.) 'Zero Dark Thirty' Is Osama bin Laden's Last Victory Over America. Indian Soap Operas, Ruled by Mothers-in-Law. Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times.
What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? Sometimes I’ll glimpse my reflection in a window and feel astonished by what I see.
Jet-black hair. Slanted eyes. A pancake-flat surface of yellow-and-green-toned skin. School for quants. Inside UCL’s Financial Computing Centre, the planet’s brightest quantitative analysts are now calculating our future On a recent winter’s afternoon, nine computer science students were sitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at University College London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. Martha Beck: Impotent Rage. Video: How Steve Jobs's Early Vision For Apple Inspired A Decade Of Innovation.
Eds. Note: Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, has passed away at the age of 56, leaving behind a larger-than-life legacy which no obituary could possibly capture. As colleagues and family members and all those who he inspired begin to reflect on his life and impact, it's impossible not to do so without feeling an almost shared sadness, as if the world is collectively mourning the loss of a close relative--even if most of us weren't fortunate to meet him. We all knew this day was coming, but we can't believe it came so soon. Simply put, Steve Jobs made our lives better, and the world is a worse place without his presence and vision. In his memory, we'll be re-publishing stories on Jobs and all that he came to represent. Steve Jobs's return to Apple in 1997 is often referred to as the greatest second act in business history.
I want to be alone: the rise and rise of solo living. Got Cheap Milk? - By Charles Kenny. As the U.S. government starts planning budget reductions that will slash everything from defense spending to health care to bridge repair, potential cuts worth around 0.00025 percent of the value of the deficit reduction agreed on in the recent $2 trillion deal appear to have garnered outsized attention: support to farmers' markets. The Querent. Dan Savage on the Virtues of Infidelity. Online Dating: Sex, Love, and Loneliness. Yawning Bread on Wordpress. My Summer at an Indian Call Center.
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave. Subtle Parenting Choices in Our American-Palestinian Jewish-Musl - InterfaithFamily.com. My eldest daughter first met her grandparents on her father's side on our 1997 trip to my husband's Palestinian village in Northern Israel. Chinese Citizens on Tour in Europe. For several millennia, ordinary people in China were discouraged from venturing beyond the Middle Kingdom, but before the recent New Year’s holiday—the Year of the Rabbit began on February 3rd—local newspapers were dense with international travel ads. It felt as if everyone was getting away, and I decided to join them.
When the Chinese travel industry polls the public on its dream destinations, no place ranks higher than Europe. China’s travel agents compete by carving out tours that conform less to Western notions of a grand tour than to the likes and dislikes of their customers. I scanned some deals online: “Big Plazas, Big Windmills, Big Gorges” was a four-day bus tour that emphasized photogenic countryside in the Netherlands and Luxembourg; “Visit the New and Yearn for the Past in Eastern Europe” had a certain Cold War charm, but I wasn’t sure I needed that in February. I chose the “Classic European,” a popular bus tour that would traverse five countries in ten days. What Happens When You Live Abroad. What the science of human nature can teach us. Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs. Does meditation make people act more rationally? : Thoughts from Kansas.
The Self in Self-Help. Naomi Wolf on Why Porn Turns Men Off the Real Thing. Was the Cowardly Lion Just Masturbating Too Much? Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? - Magazine. The Vegetarian Society.