Liberal Arts Majors Are the Future of the Tech Industry hbr.org

Morson and Schapiro’s solution is literature. They suggest that economists could gain wisdom from reading great novelists, who have a deeper insight into people than social scientists do. Whereas economists tend to treat people as abstractions, novelists dig into the specifics. To illustrate the point, Morson and Schapiro ask, When has a scientist’s model or case study drawn a person as vividly as Tolstoy drew Anna Karenina?

Why you shouldn't exercise to lose weight, explained with 60+ studies vox.com

We've long thought of weight loss in simple "calories in, calories out" terms. Today, researchers view this rule as overly simplistic. They now think of human energy balance as "a dynamic and adaptable system," as one study describes. When you alter one component — cutting the number of calories you eat in a day to lose weight, doing more exercise than usual — this sets off a cascade of changes in the body that affect how many calories you use up, and in turn, your body weight.

Muji is opening a hotel in Tokyo thespaces.com

Rejoice, Muji fans – the minimalist Japanese lifestyle brand is set to open a Tokyo hotel in early 2019.

My own private basic income opendemocracy.net

The most common objection to basic income is that it’s supposedly wrong to give things to people who don’t work for it, when actually, the economy already gives billions of dollars of unearned income to people who are already wealthy. The problem is we don’t share it.

Foto dalla più bella autostrada cinese ilpost.it

Per lo Xinjiang, la regione più a nord-ovest della Cina, passa quella che è considerata la più bella autostrada cinese, per via dei suoi panorami.

Take Naps at Work. Apologize to No One. nytimes.com

The Japanese even have a word for strategically sleeping on the job: “inemuri,” roughly translated to “sleeping while present.” Now is a good moment to pause and email this story to your boss.

A Time magazine with Trump on the cover hangs in his golf clubs. It’s fake. washingtonpost.com

There was no March 1, 2009, issue of Time magazine. And there was no issue at all in 2009 that had Trump on the cover.

The Mammoth Pirates rferl.org

In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush is under way.

Quella alta grande fica mantellini.it

Possiamo perdonare qualsiasi cosa al Lucio Dalla di “Come è profondo il mare” ma soprattutto possiamo utilizzare i testi di quel disco come una mefafora della violenza del talento. Che entra all’improvviso, non chiede permesso, non prevede competenze e semplicemente rovescia tutto. Capita raramente ma quando succede il mondo, tutto insieme, spicca un saltello verso l’alto.

Foreign investors snapping up London homes suitable for first-time buyers theguardian.com

In Westminster, which is favoured by Singaporean buyers, four out of 10 new-build properties were sold abroad over the two-year period. The ratio was one in four in Southwark, favoured most by buyers from Hong Kong, and about one in five in Hackney, Lewisham, Hammersmith and Fulham, Newham and Merton. The most popular destination for Chinese investment was Greenwich, where Chinese developer Knight Dragon is building nearly 16,000 homes.

This is what a brutalist world would look like on your phone theverge.com

Designer Pierre Buttin takes brutalism to a mobile extreme with new series

10 ways to have a better conversation youtube.com

When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations — and that most of us don't converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening.

Corano for dummies hello.gustomela.net

Non trovo incitazioni alla guerra, ma la violenza se è difensiva è ben più che ammessa. Maometto era un guerriero ed era un politico. Io sono abituata alla mitezza di Gesù Cristo, che a modo suo in quel donarsi alla volontà di Dio è molto islamico. La figura di Gesù ricorre spesso, ed è sorprendente il come. È un loro profeta. In suo insegnamento totalmente accolto, ma inteso in maniera un po’ (non tanto) diversa da quella del Cristianesimo. Per l'Islam i 12 apostoli erano veri musulmani. Come Abramo, come Maria (altra figura sorprendente nel Corano). Non ce le insegnano queste cose a scuola nell'ora di religione.

Why Trump Actually Pulled Out Of Paris politico.com

Trump may believe climate change is a hoax manufactured in China, and congressional Republicans may continue to oppose any action to address it, but that won’t make the physical realities of climate-driven droughts, floods, pandemics and refugee migrations any less brutal. It’s reminiscent of the old riddle: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a horse have? Four, because a tail is not a leg. Trump can call global warming a hoax, but 2014 was nevertheless the hottest year on record, until it was displaced by 2015, which was overtaken by 2016. That tail is not a leg.

“Personal kanban”: a life-changing time-management system that explodes the myth of multitasking qz.com

Starting but not finishing too many projects puts a person at risk of the so-called Zeigarnik effect, named for Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychiatrist who, in the 1920s, discovered that people are better at remembering unfinished tasks than completed ones.

Miley Cyrus’s Creepy Return to Wholesomeness newyorker.com

It’s not so much that Cyrus has changed (or that she has, at least, changed tack strategically; both are so ordinary as to be banal), it’s that this is what everybody thinks a grownup woman looks like: pretty, tamed, straight, still, white.

Breitbart numbers are down fivethirtyeight.com

Breitbart was riding high ahead of the inauguration — the 29th-most trafficked site on the web according to web-monitor Alexa — but it’s now down to 281st place

With Italy No Longer in U.S. Focus, Russia Swoops to Fill the Void nytimes.com

Russia is assiduously courting Italy, a country that once had the largest Communist party outside the Soviet bloc and that many analysts consider the soft underbelly of the European Union.

100 Movies 100 Numbers 100 Seconds youtube.com

Basic rules: 100 unique films, and no years (e.g., back in '43), only numbers used.

Me and my penis: 100 men reveal all theguardian.com

Dodsworth has now photographed 100 men. In each photo, you see penis and testicles, belly, hands and thighs. The humanity lies in the relationship between these body parts. A few of the men look like self-satisfied alphas (we have to guess: we can’t see their faces), but most appear vulnerable in one way or the other, whether it’s their pose or the way they hold their hands.

What know-it-alls don’t know, or the illusion of competence aeon.co

One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.

How To Be More Productive by Working Less markmanson.net

Exercise has diminishing returns for the simple reason that your muscles tire out. And as your muscles tire out, their ability to be stimulated for further growth diminishes until it’s more or less non-existent. Spending two hours in the gym gets you little to no extra benefit as spending an hour. And spending an hour only gives you slightly more benefit than spending 45 minutes. Most work is this way. Why? Because, like a muscle, your brain tires out. And if you’re exercising your brain by doing any sort of problem-solving, or important decision-making, then you’re limited in how much you can effectively accomplish in a day.

What’s brewing in Germany?: How to understand Angela Merkel’s comments about America and Britain economist.com

Foreigners often get Mrs Merkel all wrong. She is not the queen of Europe, nor has she any desire to be it. She is a domestic leader and politician whose mounting international stature is always a function of her ability to serve the interests and predilections of German voters. It is predominantly because Germans, for deep historical and cultural reasons, feel so “European” that that she talks and acts in a “European” way. Perhaps all the more for this, Mrs Merkel’s comments today illustrate how much Trumpandbrexit has hurt America and Britain in the past months. They have made it not just possible but also electorally beneficial for a friendly leader of a crucial partner to bash them in public. And more than that: to do it with sincerity.

Brexit and the coming food crisis: ‘If you can’t feed a country, you haven’t got a country' theguardian.com

Britain’s food production depends on seasonal migrant labour from the EU

The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct: A Sokal-Style Hoax on Gender Studies skeptic.com

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

How to Spot Visualization Lies flowingdata.com

Bar charts use length as their visual cue, so when someone makes the length shorter using the same data by truncating the value axis, the chart dramatizes differences. Someone wants to show a bigger change than is actually there.

Thousands of 'Second Life' Bunnies Are Going to Starve to Death This Saturday waypoint.vice.com

Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours.

The Chinese Factory Workers Who Write Poems on Their Phones lithub.com

The very act of writing these poems is self-fulfilling, a way for those without a voice to counter the detachment they feel from each other, from their work, from the things they make, and to reclaim their own sense of humanity. The poems also provide an opportunity for us not to lazily point fingers at China’s human rights abuses, but to think about our own casual complicity in these workers’ hardship. Their eloquent commitment to poetry provides another way of understanding the cost of sweatshop labor that stretches way beyond cold, unfeeling economics.

Fairytale Prisoner by Choice: The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump medium.com

There is a striking passivity to the Trump Tower view photographs. She never changed the composition of these landscapes, she placed no personal mark on them. The time of day changes, she takes a photo, that’s it. There is a calmness, a kind of safety, to this approach. The earth moves around the sun but the photographer is stable, in the exact same position, day after day.

M&Ms and Skittles sorting machine willemm.nl

The machine is able to sort M&M’s and Skittles by colour by performing optical measurements using the RGB sensor.

Wired in the 1990s kottke.org

I used to work at Wired, and later at The Verge, and at both places we had a lot of reverence for “Wired in the 90s.” You’d say it fast like that, too — “wired-in-the-90s” — and it was a universally recognized shorthand for relevance, cool, slick design, smart writers, the “culture of now.”

What “Things Going Wrong” Can Look Like medium.com

While I hope that most people are beyond the stage of saying “oh, this is all just campaign rhetoric,” I know that many people will still say that, and will probably keep saying that until the day something happens to them directly. But given that in his first eight days in office, Trump has proven himself quite honest on the campaign trail — going out and doing exactly the things he said he would, from ordering walls and detention camps built at the Mexican border to banning even legal permanent residents who are citizens of various Muslim countries (but only the Muslim ones) from entering the country — I’m hoping people are starting to realize that no, it wasn’t just a joke.

Japanese toilet industry agrees to standardize complex bidet controls theverge.com

The Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, a consortium of companies producing plumbing products including Toto, Panasonic, and Toshiba, has agreed to unify the iconography used on the often baffling control panels for Japanese toilets.

Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art forward.com

As a photograph, it’s a rare achievement. As a cover, it’s a statement.

Definitive data on what poor people buy when they’re just given cash qz.com

A recently published research paper (paywall) by David Evans of the World Bank and Anna Popova of Stanford University shows that giving money to the poor has a negative effect on the consumption of tobacco and alcohol. Evans and Popova’s research is based on an examination of nineteen studies that assess the impact of cash transfers on expenditures of tobacco and alcohol. Not one of the 19 studies found that cash grants increase tobacco and alcohol consumption and many of them found that it leads to a reduction.