Gordon's Notes

I noticed a while back that eating disorders were no longer an active area of public anxiety. So I looked at Google Trends since 2004 (clic...

I last wrote about "mass disability" and the Left Behind in a 2021 post . The concept has sometimes seemed on the edge of going ma...

It’s a human thing. Something insane happens and we try to figure out “why now?”. We did a lot of that in the fall of 2001. Today I looked b...

In the real world HRC is President and the GOP is beginning a painful reform process that will lead to a far better conservative party and a...

How do you give someone who has committed themselves to a bad cause a way out? You don’t do it by beating on how stupid they are … From  H...

We know the shape of the socioeconomic future for the bottom 40%  in the post globalization post AI   mass disability world . But how do ...

Terry Pratchett taught me about “crab bucket” in Unseen Academicals  [1]. I don’t know if it’s a metaphor of his part of England, or if it’...

From today’s NYT Health section: Death Rates Rising for Middle-Aged White Americans. Gina Kolata Nov 2, 2015 … middle-aged white American...

WaPo has a delightfully meta-subversive headline for an article about the failings of 21st century capitalism:  This Kardashian headline sho...

Anthro prof  John Hawks , one of my favorite bloggers, is hosting a sure-to-be-good PBS series called First Peoples . You can stream the (u...

My 16yo is having his wisdom teeth removed tomorrow. Blame it on human domestication. The Economist explains the process . Domestication, w...

There have been a flurry of articles lately on the cost of raising an American child, including a NYT blog post . This old news to students ...

A guy with a big chip on his shoulder isn't going to do well. He's easy to play with, but even without manipulation he's going t...

There may be atheists in foxholes, but there are few realists in the C-suite - or the White House. Optimists rule, and they scorn realists ...

It helps if you think of humans as biological robots with varying programming ... Politics, Odors and Soap - Kristof - NYTimes.com ... “T...

The American "War on Christmas" movement seems thoroughly silly .... Reminder: Tis the Season Not to Be an Ass – Whatever ...i...

Despite a few hiccups in our economy, the diversion of money to  executive compensation continues, particularly to the shareholder employee...

In my early years white male heterosexual superiority was pretty much hardwired into my culture. I grew up in Quebec, so in my earliest pre-...

The GOP wasn't always this crazy. Minnesota's Arne Carlson, for example, wasn't a bad governor. Schwarzenegger had his moments. ...

(with thanks to Joseph P for the cite). There were familiar computing names in the 1980s - Apple, IBM and so on. There were also many now l...