October 2010
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I spent 29 years in solitary confinement →
I first entered Louisiana State Penitentiary in the early 60s, at the age of 18. I was in and out of that place for the rest of the decade. Back then, if you were young, black and had a record, police in New Orleans would come looking for you when they had a backlog of unsolved cases: it was called cleaning the books.
In 1969, I was locked up for a robbery I didn’t do and, while...
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This is a news website article about a scientific... →
In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding?
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research...
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Lil Wayne reveals the truth
At first I was like:
But then I became retrospective and reticent:
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September 2010
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The Rules →
1. Have talent. (Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don’t like you have to admit it’s good.)
2. Understand how the world works. (Not just globally, but on a macro level. Understand what people need and don’t need. Understand when to approach people and when not to. Develop social skills.)
3. Choose good friends. (There’s...
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Intellectuals and Society →
Intellectuals and Society
IRVING KRISTOL ONCE DEFINED an intellectual as someone who “knows a little bit about everything.” And, as he was quick to add, he did not mean that disparagingly.
Thomas Sowell, who knows quite a lot about many things, is much more disdainful of intellectuals. He’s now written a whole volume trying to explain why they are so troublesome. The...
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Dunbar's number →
Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, ...
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