Letters Remain

Month: May 2009

  • The Future of the Calendar

    The calendar has the possibility to become “the biggest software revolution of the future”, says Scott Adams in an article looking at how crucial time and proximity are in making information (more) relevant. I also found myself agreeing with Adams’ thoughts on news: When I read the news, I’m generally most interested in how stories…

  • How Do Free Online Book Releases Affect Sales?

    Do free book releases (gratis and/or libre) affect books sales in a positive or negative way? To try and find out, John Hilton of Brigham Young University tracked the sales of books 8 weeks prior and following a number of promotional free release from various publishers. On March 4 of this year, Random House announced…

  • (Un)Successful Assignment Proposals

    I could/should have included this in my previous post on Baum, but I believe these merit separate mention: Successful assignment proposals for publications such as Playboy, Rolling Stone and The New York Times. Unsuccessful assignment proposals for Gourmet, The New Yorker, and more. As Jason points out, New Yorker editor John Bennet called Baum’s proposal for a story…

  • Dan Baum and The New Yorker

    Dan Baum (a staff writer for The New Yorker ’til his firing in 2007) has been revealing details about his tenure on his Twitter account. In addition to discussing some day-to-day workings of The New Yorker, he’s also provided some great advice for aspiring writers. Baum has compiled his tweets in a much more readable format on his…

  • Superstition and Irrationality

    I’d like to class myself as a fairly rational being, but we all have our transgressions, right? So are we all maybe a bit superstitious? To answer this, Richard Wiseman offers this common thought experiment from Bruce Hood’s new book, Supersense: Imagine that you only have two objects in your house: 1) A £10 watch that was given to you by…

  • Ending Foreign Aid to Africa

    Foreign aid to Africa has turned the continent into a ‘giant welfare state’ and is one of the direct causes for the rise in poverty rates from 11% to 66% in recent times. This is according to African author and economist Dambisa Moyo as she adds her voice to the growing group of learned economists…

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • The Genetic Gap

    I can’t write a better leading sentence than David already has: “In an article encouraging us not to use genetic tendencies for racist ends, William Saletan offers a possible genetic answer [to the question, Why are there so many black athletes?]” One example is the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular…

  • Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius

    I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…

  • Psychology of Sales

    Retailers aren’t in sales; they’re “in the perception business”, says Jonah Lehrer while discussing how we perceive goods of varying prices, especially discounted goods. Consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more…