How We End Up Marrying the Wrong People – The Philosopher’s Mail
“All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.”
Trust No One: Kim Philby on the Hazards of Mistrust – The New Yorker
“Books about spies and traitors—and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors—generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors. The disclosure of national-security secrets is so damaging that its prevention is worth almost any price. The Philby case, however, leaves a very different impression. On one side of the ledger, we have a senior counterintelligence official recklessly accusing the democratically elected leader of his own country of treason. On the other side, we have a series of false-negative errors that, in the end, don’t seem to add up to much.”
Anthony Bourdain’s Theory on the Foodie Revolution – Smithsonian Magazine
“Along with all of this has been the transformation in the status of the chef from behind-the-scenes pot-stirrer to culinary rock star. And in this particular cultural revolution the original rock star, the Elvis of bad boy chefs, is Anthony Bourdain. He achieved his breakthrough with a sensational book called Kitchen Confidential, a surprise worldwide best seller about the frenzied, obscenity-laced, sex-and-drug-fueled back-burner ballet of tattooed pirates who brandish spatulas like swords. He went on to be a fixture on the Food Network, on “Top Chef,” paired with domestic goddess Nigella Lawson on “The Taste,” while somehow maintaining a globe-trotting food and travel show on CNN called “Parts Unknown.””
In Japan, Idled Electronics Factories Find New Life in Farming – The Wall Street Journal
“Amid troubled times in the Japanese electronics industry, Fujitsu shut one of the three chip-making lines at the plant in 2009. Now, in a sterile, dust-free clean room that once built the brains of high-tech gadgets, Mr. Miyabe and a staff of about 30 tend heads of lettuce.”
How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will – Wired
“It began in early 2012, when he experienced a sudden 75 percent drop off in customers on the weekend, the time he normally did most of his business. The slump continued for months, for no apparent reason. Bertagna’s profits plummeted, he was forced to lay off some of his staff, and he struggled to understand what was happening. Only later did Bertagna come to suspect that he was the victim of a gaping vulnerability that made his Google listings open to manipulation.”
Black Year: Everest’s Deadliest Season – Outside
“At that moment, a quarter of the way up the west shoulder, an ice chunk the size of a ten-story apartment building peeled off and fell. In Madison Mountaineering’s communications tent, Base Camp manager Kurt Hunter was on the radio with his sirdar, Dorjee Khatri. He heard the rumble from above, then a scream over the air, then nothing.”
The Data of Hate – The New York Times
“Stormfront members tend to be young, at least according to self-reported birth dates. The most common age at which people join the site is 19. And four times more 19-year-olds sign up than 40-year-olds. Internet and social network users lean young, but not nearly that young.”
Where Online Services Go When They Die – The Atlantic
“Fifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.”
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Photo courtesy of Space Ritual.
