Abstract Capital: August 2009

Abstract Capital

Monday, August 31, 2009

Apparently I have to write to keep this blog active, not just post a bunch of articles. Well, I'm still here!

...

Later!

posted by Flaco @ 5:00 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

NPR: Vacation U.S.A. For Less Than $100 A Day

Mental Floss: Why Do Shells Sound Like the Ocean?

Economist: Maryland, Thanks Be to D.C. - The Benefits of Proximity to Big (and getting Bigger) Government

Economist: Underage drinking and deaths have prompted a movement for change

Slate: Why haven't there been more tall sprinters like Usain Bolt?

Slate: Watching Wildlife with White People in South Africa

NPR: Native American Activist Peltier Denied Parole

FP: Rethinking Realism in IR

CNN: Don't Ban Prostitution, Legalize, and Educate Men

FP: A Guide to the Coming Green Geopolitical Crises

Economist: Piracy & Private Enterprise - Splashing & Clashing in Murky Waters: Private security firms are increasingly involved in the fight against pirates. The allocation of tasks between them and navies needs some thought

TIME: Abercrombie & Fitch - World's Worst Recession Brand? (Umm yeah!)

Slate: Does Washington have anything just waiting to be named after Ted Kennedy?

Slate: What Happens in Congressional Offices when the Boss is Gone?

Slate: Why Corporate IT Should Unchain our Office Computers!

Salon: Even The New Republic now calls for a party purge of corporate-owned "Centrists"

FP: Who Is the New Head of UNESCO?

Slate: The Myth of the 500-Foot Home Run

New Yorker: New York City Teachers, the *Worst* Teachers, & the Teachers' Union - "The (Teachers') Union would Protect even a Dead Body in the Classroom"

CNN: ACLU (Red) Flags Facebook App. Privacy

CSMonitor: When the Internet Breaks, Who Ya Gonna Call?

CNN: Old-school portraits see resurgence on Facebook (What?!?)

Atlantic Food: Inside an Authentic Hawaiian Luau

FP: A Visual History of Communist Russia

FP: Summer Reading of Our Discontent - Global Escapism is Flourishing in the Era of the Great Recession

CSMonitor: Syria - Where War Hides History

Atlantic: Stanley H. Kaplan's Legacy

TIME: Q & A - Inside the College-Admissions Process

TIME: Reader's Digest Files for Bankruptcy

NPR: On This Day In 1968: Alaska Sen. Gruening, Tonkin Gulf and the *Original* Vietnam War Foe, Unseated

FP: What the World's Poorest can teach us about Money Management

Slate: Is 1,000 pages long for a piece of legislation?

TIME: Search Engine Rivals - Bing vs. Google

Atlantic Food Channel: Sugar - What I Didn't Say on the Colbert Report

Economist: Youth Unemployment - How it may have a lasting effect on young people

NPR: Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia's New Editing Policy

TIME: Agroforestry - Farms & Forests: Trees Fight Back

Slate: Movie review - The Baader Meinhof Complex

TIME: India's Opposition Struggles with Past & Present

SI: Advance scouting in NBA gets hit as teams try to cut back

Atlantic: Recession Teaches More Than Hardship

TIME: Journey to North Korea, Part III - The NoKo Chocolate Factory

NPR: Officer Calley Apologizes For My Lai Massacre

Newsweek: Lonely Planet - Isolation Increases In US

TIME: Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Hawaii

Economist: A Very British Coup - The Turks and Caicos loses independence: Self-Government is suspended amid reports of serious corruption

CNN: Relax & Learn on the Yucatan Peninsula

CNN: Get locals' lei of the land in Oahu, Hawaii

CBS: Selective enforcement? NCAA failed to admonish Duke

FP: And if they gave a prize for ill-considered prizes... - Erroneous Nobel Peace Prizes

CNN: Freaky News About your Brain!

Newsweek: A Social History of the MP3

TIME: Will the Trabant, the "Trabi", East Germany's Clunker, Make a Comeback?

FP: Resource-Cursed Equatorial Guinea

TIME: Seattle Mayor Concedes Defeat in Primary

ESPN: Your Second-Favorite Team

Economist: Robert Novak, The "Prince of Darkness", Farewell to one of Washington's greatest insiders

Atlantic: It Wasn't the Securitization that Was Irresponsible

Economist: Venezuela's education “reforms” - Hugo Chávez seeks to catch them young: A hastily passed education law is part of the president's plan to take control of all aspects of Venezuelan society

NPR: American Nuns Question Vatican Scrutiny

TIME: The China-India Rivalry - Watching the Border

SI: Ranking all 32 NFL Teams' No. 2 Quarterbacks

posted by Flaco @ 6:30 PM 0 comments

Thursday, August 20, 2009

CNN: Controlling the jealousy monster

FP: Bring the pane - Lazy Journalism - The "rare windows" of the New York Times

Salon: The Return of Jello!

TIME: How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead

Slate: Why we don't use Galileo's last name

CNN: The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers

TIME: Journey to North Korea, Part I - Photojournalist Enters 'Surreal' North Korea in Ruse

TIME: Journey to North Korea, Part II - The Pack-Rat Dictatorship

ESPN: Is this the year the ACC makes the jump into BCS contention?

ESPN: Cover-ups of mysterious injuries

TIME: The GOP Has Become a Party of Nihilists

FP: A $9 Trillion Question - Did the World Get Muhammad Yunus Wrong?

Economist: Libya and Muammar Qaddafi, 40 years on - How to squander a nation's potential

ESPN: NBA - The High-Grade Sleeper Teams

ESPN: New ombudsman analyzes ESPN's handling of the Ben Roethlisberger story

ESPN: ACC Preview - Men's College Basketball

FP: How international relations theory would cope with a zombie uprising

ESPN: A-10 Preview - Men's College Basketball

ESPN: SI - Nationals' run to respectability

CNN: 10 folks who got rich during the Depression

ESPN: A lot of top corner prospects still available in the 2010 class

posted by Flaco @ 3:45 PM 0 comments

TIME: A Brief History Of Wikipedia

TIME: Why Google Wants You to Google Yourself

CNN: The words you love to hate (video)

Economist: The Geneva conventions at 60 - Unleashing the laws of war

Economist: Galileo, four centuries on - As important as Darwin

Newsweek: Hold Music's Complex Science

Slate: Today's unprecedented expansion of judicial powers

TIME: Lolcats - Building a Media Empire Around ICanHasCheezburger.com

Slate: Does it really save gas to roll down your windows instead of flipping on the AC?

Atlantic: WTO Opens Up China to U.S. Entertainment Products

Slate: The Brits have taken over Turks and Caicos. Is Canada next?

Slate: Whatever happened to acid rain?

Newsweek: Who Cares about the Episcopal Civil War?

Newsweek: Texans Are Most Likely to Be Uninsured, Gallup Says, But Don't Blame Immigrants

Newsweek: U.S. Views on God and Life Are Turning Hindu

TIME: Abilene - Where Porn Fought the Law and Porn Won

Newsweek: Our Search for Alien Life

Reason: Senators Aren't Gamers - "Censors tend to be people who don't enjoy the art they try to censor."

Newsweek: Should you sue your financial adviser?

Newsweek: Discovering South America's Great Outdoors

CNN: Is it OK to live together before marriage?

CNN: Exotic vacations may be closer than you think

Newsweek: College Endowments See Values Drop

Newsweek: Why We Don't Pick the Right Baseball All-Stars

CNN: Memo - U.S., Brazilian leaders talked of Chile coup in '71

Salon: "It is pointless to talk to al-Qaida"

Atlantic: Happy States and the Economic Crisis

DCPost: Roger Goodell is Overbearing

CNN: Some obsessions, compulsions not part of OCD

New Yorker: The Power of Michael Bloomberg

Economist: California's overcrowded prisons - Gulags in the sun

FP: Top Ten Sporting Events that Shook the World

Atlantic: Health Care - A Lesson In Practical Philosophy

Economist: Helping the auto industry - Swings and roundabouts

Economist: Brazil's foreign policy - Lula and his squabbling friends

Economist: Drought in Texas - Not a cloud

Reason: Strangers in a Strange Land - Forget man's inhumanity to man. District 9 is a deft satire of man's inhumanity to alien.

EW: 'Star Trek' vs. 'Lost' - Competing time-travel theories

Reason: Cross-Examining Forensics - The Supreme Court says that forensics analysts can be cross-examined...for now.

Atlantic: Another Way to Enjoy Oysters

Atlantic: The Faux Missing Ship - Pirates, Drugs, Russian Nukes? An Irresistible Debate Turns Serious

TIME: 'Liar in Your Life' Author Feldman - Why We Lie So Much

Salon: Sign me up for Barack Obama's death panel!

Atlantic: Bankers, Bonuses And Baseball

Reason: The El Paso Miracle - How can a comparatively poor, high-immigration town that sits across the border from super-violent Ciudad Juarez be one of the safest big cities in America?

Reason: The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident - Artists have a duty to dissent—even against Obama

CSMonitor: The Edible Explorer - Ancient All-Blue potatoes

N. Republic: Is Islam Good for Girls' Math Scores?

TIME: Test-Driving the New 2010 Camaro SS

Double-X: Health care woes - the grandiosity of doctors

Reason: The Real Clunkers in this Deal - Why "cash for clunkers" is a terrible idea

Reason: The sci-fi economics of "cash for clunkers"

DCPost: Why Hate Crime Laws Don't Work - Laws Won't Rein In Hate

Newsweek: I Walked All Over Crocs. What Have I Done?

N. Republic: Will Doctors Be An Impediment To Reform?

N. Republic: Political MySpaces, Ouch

TIME: Study - Drug Use Continues Among Boomers

Salon: Obama, you're no Machiavelli

Reason: Tyranny of the Minority - James MacGregor Burns' biased and cartoonish new history of the Supreme Court

Atlantic: Pakistani Public Opinion - Less Extreme Than Previously Thought?

posted by Flaco @ 12:05 AM 0 comments

Saturday, August 15, 2009

TIME: Google and Microsoft Battle for College E-Mail

Slate: Can Major League Baseball and Topps save baseball cards?

FP: Why is Hollywood messing with my childhood? - Hollywood's 80s Remakes

Economist: The decline of the landline - Unwired

Economist: Detecting habitable new worlds - The next blue planet

Economist: Tundra - The least studied climate, permafrost is getting attention as a result of global warming

Economist: Should America try Industrial Policy? (No!)

TIME: Top 10 Famous Mysterious Monsters

Economist: Improving scientific publishing - Huddled maths

Economist: It was once a rule of demography that people have fewer children as their countries get richer. That rule no longer holds true.

TIME: Swimming with the Fishes in Palau

TIME: President Obama's Latin Challenge

Economist: Latin American geopolitics - The dragon in the backyard

FP: Church & Narcostate - Why has it taken so long for the Catholic Church to criticize Mexico's recent violence?

Economist: Galaxies in the early universe - Rocking the cradle

Atlantic: Does the Obama health-care symbol mimic Nazi symbolism?

Slate: Is 90-year-old former Nazi officer Josef Scheungraber too old for jail?

Atlantic: Beer in the Ruins of Communism

TIME: 'District 9' Review

NPR: 'District 9,' An Apartheid Allegory (With Aliens)

Salon: District 9 - We Love Aliens (Just Not the Illegal Kind)

Slate: The dull, anti-corporate politics of District 9

Economist: Morality and Colour

TIME: Environment - Why Some Like it Cold

TIME: So What's the Rap on the New Neighbor? Rap Stars as your Next Neighbor

Atlantic: Goodbye to '80s Bartending Trends

Atlantic: How Democrats And Republicans Exploit Emotion

Mother Jones: Fiji Water - Spin the Bottle

Mother Jones: Mother Jones Responds to Fiji Water

Salon: Bill Clinton says - Don't stop thinking about triangulation

Economist: Southern Italy's ills - The messy mezzogiorno

NPR: Spotting Lies - Listen, Don't Look

Atlantic: Private Sector Welfare

FP: Internal State Department report criticizes Africa Bureau

Atlantic: Political Sex Scandals

Atlantic: Beware Idolatry of Numbers

ESPN: Camp Confidential - The Arizona Cardinals

ESPN: Camp Confidential - The New Orleans Saints

ESPN: Camp Confidential - The New York Jets

ESPN: Camp Confidential - The Indianapolis Colts

Newsweek: South Africa Is Acting Like a Rogue State

posted by Flaco @ 12:54 AM 0 comments

Monday, August 10, 2009

Slate: Alison Gopnik's The Philosophical Baby

Atlantic: States with more frequent drug use, tend to have more intelligent voters

Newsweek: Dick Wolf's Favorite Crimes

Salon: My Life in Xanax

Newsweek: When Countries Support Neighboring Rebellions

TIME: PayScale - Ranking Colleges Based on Alumni's Salaries

NPR: Nine Tips To Travel Cheap (But Not Stupid)

The Happiness Project : 23 Phrases to Help You Fight Right

Salon: Men behaving badly aren't funny anymore

NBC.com: The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien - Shatner Reads Palin's Tweets (funny!)

Newsweek: Latin America Swings Right, Not Left

RAND: News from RAND

Newsweek: Sandra Lee - The Anti Julia Child

CSMonitor: Young Israeli settlers go hippie? Far out, man!

Salon: Critics' Picks - The legacy of Obama's "race speech"

Atlantic: Is It Immoral to Pay for Unpaid Internships?

Salon: The Beauty & Terror of Science

CSMonitor: Germans wary as mosque rises in Cologne

Slate: An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country

FP: The New York Times op-ed page burns a hole through my cerebellum

FP: The Game hits back at FP!

posted by Flaco @ 5:10 PM 0 comments

Saturday, August 8, 2009

TIME: Soccer in Seattle - A New Kind of Football Team Woos Fans

Slate: How the notoriously pricey Whole Foods is surviving the recession

Economist: The growth of home-schooling - Kitchen-classroom conservatives

TIME: Does sunscreen really prevent skin cancer?

Slate: Jersey Rules - To Cut Political Corruption, We Must Pay Public Officials More

Boing Boing: Free parking costs a fortune

Slate: What submarines do while on patrol

Slate: Does Raising the Minimum Wage Really lead to Layoffs?

Slate: Think a coin toss has a 50-50 chance? Think again

Salon: Great moments in political race-baiting

Slate: The Economics of Narcissism - How grandiosity and lack of empathy created our modern malaise.

Sports Illustrated: ESPN needs to start displaying dose of humility

Slate: Should the FCC force Apple to sell Google's iPhone apps?

TIME: Accent on the Future (a.k.a. Accenture) - Top 10 Worst Corporate Name Changes

Economist: Sex laws in the U.S. - Unjust and ineffective

Economist: Coney Island's redevelopment - On and off the boardwalk

TIME: Reforming Crack-Cocaine Laws, but Leaving Injustice Intact?

Atlantic: Privatize the Seas

Slate: How Small, Poor Peru made the Right Economics Moves

Salon: Is the Judd Apatow moment over?

TIME: Judd Apatow of 'Funny People' - From Stand-Up to Bromance

Slate: Is there a place for yoga in homeless shelters?

CSMonitor: Evangelicals move North

TIME: The Crackdown on Executive Pay

FP: Welcome, non-traditional pursuers of the Ph.D.

Slate: Why you've stopped watching CNBC

Atlantic: Are The Treasury's Borrowing Costs Going Up?

Atlantic: Why Rich People Pay More In Taxes

Newsweek: Forget the Great In Britain - Its fall was inevitable, but the economic crisis will shrink the last pretenses of empire faster than anyone expected

Slate: How the playpen fell out of favor

Atlantic: Credit Checks and Employment - Kick 'Em When They're Down

Economist: Offshore private banking - Bourne to survive

Atlantic: Megan McArdle analyzes Cheap

Salon: Pynchon lights up

TIME: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice - A Magical Mystery Tour

Newsweek: Afghanistan’s drug war has failed

Slate: Why does Congress get so much vacation?

Atlantic: So What if Organic Isn't More Nutritious?

Slate: The organic vs. conventional debate is getting us nowhere

FP: Honduras - Who's Lobbying for the Coup?

Newsweek: How Being Right- (or Left-) Handed Shapes Judgment

Newsweek: Why Language May Shape Our Thoughts

Slate: Do political "town halls" have rules?

Atlantic: Why You Don't Believe Me Yet (Here Comes the Cavalry)

Slate: A Day in the Life of a Twintern - Meet the recent college grad who tweets for Pizza Hut.

Atlantic: Privacy v Transparency, and the Battle Over Equal Marriage

Atlantic: The Equation for an Ideal Dessert

Slate: The Arena Football League goes Bankrupt

Newsweek: The Backlash Against American Universities

Slate: Four days in North Korea

CSMonitor: Why Iran's Revolutionary Guards mercilessly crack down

Newsweek: On America's Obsession with Crime

Slate: Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

TIME: The March to the Far-Right

Slate: Why are Georgia and Georgia both named Georgia?

Economist: Crime and exoneration - Hidden evidence: DNA is changing the way America fights crime, not its policies towards convicts

Slate: Is the president helping Hawaii?

Slate: How is America going to end? - Slate's "Choose Your Own Apocalypse" lets you map out the death of the United States.

TIME: In Moldova, Europe's Last Soviet-Style Communist Government Bows Out — Probably

NRepublic: A Semi-Defense of Obama's Buckraking Ambassadors

Slate: Kyrgyzstan, the heartbreak capital of Central Asia

Slate: Could the guinea pigs from G-Force survive in the wild?

Slate: Is it possible to reassemble a shredded document?

TIME: Charles Rangel - The Lion of Harlem

Atlantic: Were Humans Once Aquatic?

posted by Flaco @ 3:21 AM 0 comments

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