Sunday, March 24, 2013

Sunday morning roundup, Part II

What immigration reformers have learned from LGBT activists. Are you listening, food movement?

Speaking of the food movement, here's a recent success story.

We've been talking about the nexus of science and beauty, so I thought it time for another shout-out to science for suggesting an unprocessed way for cookies to taste even better.

What lessons is China gleaning from the collapse of the Soviet Union?

James Andrew Lewis explains Chinese cyper-espionage quite clearly. Paul Farhi defends the media pre-Iraq. Carlos Lozada gives us more clichés to avoid. Ezra Klein explains Cyprus quite clearly and interviews Chrystia Freeland. Of particular interest (my emphasis):
There’s a question of do you buy the Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers theory of the world, or do you buy the manifest destiny, I-have-the-royal-jelly and you don’t view? There’s no one way of seeing the world, and different people are different, but for me, the most vivid statement of the royal jelly view came from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who said if a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him. The great thing about the Russians is they’ll say that kind of stuff directly.
and (emphasis mine, again)
Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire, set up a prize in theoretical physics where he gave three million bucks each to what he thought were the nine best theoretical physicists in the world. The reason he did that, he said, is that he thinks that the way our society allocates brainpower against work is not ideal. He thinks the work he does is kind of boring and humdrum and doesn’t make that much of a difference in the world but leads to these huge rewards, while in his view, the most defining and important work, the work that makes us human, is grappling with understanding the universe. George Soros will say that he thinks the most important human endeavor is to be a philosopher. You encounter that sentiment less often among the anglo saxons, because we’ve persuaded ourselves that the heroes of our social narrative our businesspeople.

No comments: