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Humanities Magazine: Unhappy Camper

If you want your child to be a writer, go bankrupt.

The evidence confirms it. Failing that, at least suffer a severe financial reversal, obliging your son or daughter to endure the social opprobrium of changed schools and dropped friendships. Let him know the shame of fallen status, that he might grow ever more attuned to the minutest of slights, real or imagined. Careful scrutiny of his fellows will likely become a habit, a good sense of humor his first line of defense. Imagination will be his refuge. If you want your child to be a writer, do all this, and you may yet join an impecunious fraternity of writers’ parents that includes John Shakespeare, John Joyce, John Clemens, John Dickens, John Ernst Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut, Sr.

Chicago Tribune: Pajama ban: Are pajamas a public menace?

The latest trend should be a relief to anyone averse to immodesty. This is not racy lingerie but baggy, even frumpy, clothing that typically furnishes coverage a Victorian could love. Fathers of teenage daughters, it's safe to say, would prefer that their little angels venture forth in shapeless flannel pajamas than micro-minis and flimsy tank tops.

Wired: Physicists Discover Quantum Speed Limit

In non-relativistic systems, where particle speeds are much less than the speed of light, interactions still occur very quickly, and they often involve lots of particles. As a result, measuring the speed of interactions within materials has been difficult. The theoretical speed limit is set by the Lieb-Robinson bound, which describes how a change in one part of a system propagates through the rest of the material. In this new study, the Lieb-Robinson bound was quantified experimentally for the first time, using a real quantum gas.

The Wilson Quarterly: In the Footsteps of Giants

Well, I was a freelancer—a polite term for unemployed—at the time, so I extorted a tiny advance and went off to collect everything I could find out about Solzhenitsyn’s life. Looking back, it’s curious that I had the biographical itch from the beginning, because I could have written about many things, I suppose, and it didn’t necessarily need to be a biography, but that was the way I thought about it. However, Solzhenitsyn was so successful at covering his tracks that I couldn’t find out nearly enough to satisfy me, and I simply gave up.

The Atlantic: The Great Unbundling of the University

The big question for universities going forward is this: Can control of credentialing last for long without control of knowledge? If a great many people learn from Sebastian Thrun and Udacity how to create a search engine, and if some of those are very good search engines, might not the most successful students simply point to their work as a sufficient indicator of their coding chops? Who needs a credential when they can use a simple URL to show potential employers not just what they're capable of but what they have already achieved?

Capital New York: Why Hollywood makes Creepy Kid movies

It's not hard to understand why the theme is so attractive, even though it's also so repulsive. Children are supposed to be innocent. Adults deserve what they get, if they are bad, but children should always be exempt. Our entire moral understanding depends on everybody agreeing upon this. Audiences project onto children their own feelings of protectiveness, and depicting a child in distress is one of the most effective ways of engaging an audience in any story.

How to Survive in the Age of Amazon

Because in order to survive, bookstores must stop trying to compete with Amazon.

I should pause here to clarify that when I use the word “bookstore,” I mean “independent bookstore.” Considering that barely any bookstore chains are left standing, this should be fairly apparent—but just in case any of you might think I’m talking about the few remaining Barnes & Noble or Borders megastores that still rise like brick-and-mortar colossi over the exurbs, I’m not.

Wired: Watch a Baby Condor Hatch and Grow on Live Webcam

California condors are very nurturing parents. They’re also very egalitarian: Both parents take care of their young. Sisquoc and Shatash will discipline, groom and play with their baby. They’ll give it feathers to play with and rub their baby’s soft pink face with their own.

The Atlantic: The Autumn of Joan Didion

Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of womanhood, in that fragile, fleeting, emotional time that she explored in a way no one else ever has. Didion is, depending on the reader’s point of view, either an extraordinarily introspective or an extraordinarily narcissistic writer. As such, she is very much like her readers themselves. “I’ve been reading you since I was an adolescent,” a distinctly non-adolescent female voice said on a call-in show a decade ago, and Didion nodded, comprehending. All of us who love her the most have, in ways literal and otherwise, been reading her since adolescence.

The American Conservative: Revenge of the Nerd

Ray Bradbury loves human beings, and his hatred of the digital devices that divide us from us stems from their dehumanizing influence. Sure, they make us more passive and corrode our mental circuits. But of greatest importance, technology, amidst a million obvious benefits, has the overlooked drawback of making human life less human. Basement Internet porn addictions preventing relationships, video games supplanting sports as an afterschool activity, vicarious social life through reality television, and hundreds of Facebook friends without a single true friend are all manifestations of the way technology helps man dodge his fellow man.

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