Smartphone fanboys

A fascinating article about smartphone fanboys. Combines juicy content with dazzling page design. (Hat tip to the inimitable Enoch Constantine Wu!)

Look at the road, not the mountain

Advice on how to meditate:

When the practice isn’t giving results as fast as you’d desire, remember that the problem isn’t with the desire per se. You’ve simply focused it on the wrong place: on the results rather than on the causes that will produce those results. It’s like driving a car to a mountain on the horizon. If you spend all your time looking at the mountain, you’ll drive off the road. You have to focus your attention on the road and follow it each inch along the way. That will take you to the mountain.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, With Each and Every Breath, pp. 77-78.

Call Me Boroughs: A Life

BookForum review of Call Me Burroughs: A Life. A choice quotation:

Cut-ups allowed Burroughs to efface himself in text the same way he effaced himself in person, by fading into the foreground. Miles chronicles the exuberant collaborations in Paris during which Burroughs and company experimented with scrying, Orgone boxes, dreamachines, telepathy, and drugs—always drugs. If Kerouac was the Beats' freewheeling angel and Ginsberg their tantric cheerleader, then Burroughs was the eternal saboteur: "I order total resistance directed against this conspiracy to pay off peoples of the earth in ersatz bullshit. I order total resistance.… With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly."

The man and his guns:

Not sure what else to add. A peculiar fellow.

A tale of "Trouble"; or, cinnamon toast at $4 a slice

A journalist uncovers the fascinating personal story of the woman who started the latest artisanal food craze.

Claims about meditation

According to this story in SF Gate, meditation (or "quiet time" as they are calling it) in Bay Area schools has been improving student performance and discipline. 

Your cat is a jerk, because science

According to the Huffington Post, anyway.

College athletes who can't read

Investigative journalism on NCAA athletes and the universities who fail them by admitting students not ready for college and systematically cheating or covering up for their academic problems. Not a shock, but surely a disgrace.

The story of the burglars behind the "Pentagon Papers"

Some of the civil rights activists who took on the FBI and got away with it are coming from the shadows to tell their story. 

"How Netflix reverse engineered Hollywood"

Alexis Madrigal's article in The Atlantic on the secret alchemy behind Netflix's microgenres.

Facebook sued for scanning users' messages

Regardless of the merits or the outcome of this case, it's fair to say we Facebook users are openly inviting the vampire-marketers into our hearths and homes. A bargain with the Devil for our 'free' social medium. To sling a little economics jargon, network goods can be a bitch. (Since everyone is using Facebook, it's not easy to find a substitute with as many people we know.)

Denmark restricts bakers' use of cinnamon

"Angry Danes want their buns reclassified quickly, but they'll have to wait until February for a resolution of the hot baking issue." 

Why students do better overseas

When it comes to education, the U.S. has a lot to learn (ahem).

Praising by faint condemnation

SF Gate review of the Coen brothers' latest film, "Inside Llewyn Davis."

A pair of Pound's proteges

1. Robert Frost, egomaniacal lecher.

2. James Joyce, rescued for Literature by a Poundian missive.

New evidence about materialism (the non-metaphysical variety)

Materialism is correlated with and may cause anxiety and depression.

Grade inflation in the UK

The story of an academic who rebelled against pressure by administrators to raise grades. The tale of slipping standards and students increasingly unprepared for university is also familiar on this side of the pond.