This Week in Sports: In Praise of Hack-a-Drummond
Would anyone watch basketball if it had no ethical component — i.e., if it were without mistakes, without some intimation of the fact that the players are as fragile as we are? Could our excitement for the game withstand a lack of blunderers, choke-artists, and scapegoats? Would there be such a thing as a game if no one ever missed?
Blood you can wash off. But not whiteness. It’s underneath the blood.
When we try to flip through any one of the volumes lining the desert island’s shore, we find that its pages have been bleached by sun and surf.
Think of how it must feel to lose everything you’ve ever worked for to the showy unpredictability of a nature growing over the millennia. No one is ever safe.
What Machines Know: Surveillance Anxiety and Digitizing the World
Mass surveillance and predictive policing are all the rage. And in the act of performing identity online, ordinary people help make the world more machine-readable. Why do we play along?
Is the bossless office egalitarian, or does it simply camouflage inequalities and portend the further erosion of organized labor?
Bossnappings are a symbolically potent tactic in the arsenal of labor militancy, especially now that workers are increasingly required to identify with their management.
Albert Murray and the Americas
It’s appropriate that at the end of Murray’s century, when life is particularly low, dirty, and shameful, to have him remind us to pull it together and stomp.
Flexibility, the art of adapting, and the necessity of continuous creation: A Talk on Jazz
This music helps us to free ourselves from conformity, which is just a form of stagnation and snobbery, thus always guiding us toward the future.
Lore & Peace: What Tolstoy Can Teach Us About Bowe Bergdahl
Long before Bowe Bergdahl dreamed of military battle, Leo Tolstoy was writing about the seductive nature of war stories and their ability to lure young men to gruesome and early deaths.