¶ Word Magazine: Album Covers Map: a world interactive map showing where iconic music album cover photographs were taken. (via).
¶ Interactive Map Showing Immigration Data Since 1880 (NYTimes): this infography is awesome.
¶ NSFW: ‘Tis Pity She’s A Success – Belle de Jour and the Impossibility of Anonymous Blogging (TechCrunch): Belle De Jour, anonymous and very famous blogger in the Uk outed herself in the Sunday Times, in her blog ( and successful book and film), she wrote stories of her days as a call girl when she ran out of money to pay for her studies. TechCrunch ponders about anonymous successful blogging and the impossibility of remaining unknown.
[humanities]
¶ Pinker on Malcolm Gladwell (NYTimes):
The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarterback’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.[politics]
¶ Schneier on Security: Beyond Security Theater: a must read, Mr Schneier is a leading expert in security and this essay is very thoughtful ans interesting:
By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant "bring 'em on" rhetoric. There's a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.[miscellanies]
We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice -- not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.
Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them.
¶ Craig Brown parodies Malcolm Gladwell (Vanity Fair) "Santa Claus is a total loser"
¶ Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov's work (The Guardian)