With the help of the McKinsey gang, important thinkers such as Soumitra Dutta and Matthew Fraser of INSEAD are hosting discussions about how the internet and the recession might collide. Their angle: "When Job Seekers Invade Facebook". In their conversation starter, Facebook is offered as a venue th...

Anyone who has been paying any attention to world affairs will by now have heard of the traffic “accident” Friday in which Zimbabwean Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai was gravely injured, and his wife killed. Tsvangirai has been a thorn in dictator Robert Mugabe’s side since leavin...

I’ve always liked Dick Cavett. His career as a prominent public conversationalist began in 1968, when I, as twelve-year-old, was only beginning to understand how grownups could possibly enjoy just sitting around talking. My mother used to watch his show, and I found, to my surprise, that I enj...

Have you heard about scent branding? Seems all types of businesses are hiring companies to come in and flavor their air with custom scent blends to entice customers or perhaps cover up bad odors.On one level, it makes sense, I guess. Realtors tell you to bake cookies or pie when you have an open hou...

There is rather an amusing ruckus underway in the Republican Party, which has been floundering in disarray since the presidential race. The titular head of the GOP, Michael Steele, has been going mano a mano with Rush Limbaugh over who is really the party’s leader. Steele may have the official...

In today’s email, a friend has sent me some photographs of angry Muslims demonstrating on the street in what appears to be London. They are carrying signs, glowering menacingly, brandishing their fists, and shouting. The messages they carry are clear enough, if rather unimaginatively monotonou...

There’s an interesting little item in the news today: paleoanthropologists have found footprints 1.5 million years old that record the earliest known example of anatomically modern human feet — feet that are designed solely (so to speak) for walking, and not for grasping. It is hard to i...

We’ve had some noisy conversations here recently on the subject of immigration. My own position has been that we should admit those, and only those, who will be assets rather than liabilities — and that we need to cultivate in ourselves the discernment to tell the difference. We want int...

A few days ago Dennis Mangan posted at his website, Mangan’s Miscellany, some remarks of mine about a notion he had been discussing: the restriction of immigration on the basis of race. This gave rise to a long comment-thread. The comments were of varying quality, but nearly universal in their...

Software engineers often imagine that Google must be just the best place to work. A couple of years ago I visited a friend who works in their New York office (which then was in Times Square), and I have to say it looked pretty good: a beautiful, modern office with all sorts of worker-friendly touche...