From the bracket analysis over at ESPN.COM: On Jan. 17, Texas was 17-0 and ranked No. 1. Then the Longhorns went 5-8 to close out the regular season. What happened? They boast incredible athletes, but the team’s offense has become a turnover-plagued mess. Plus this is one of the worst free-throw shooting squads around. Beware. [...]
There are various objections to expanding the conventional, up-tight, as-God-intended “one man, one woman” notion of marriage but by far the least plainly bigoted ones I am aware of are the bureaucratic ones. To be blunt, the systems aren’t set up to handle it. The paper forms have a space for the husband’s name and [...]
The first is about what makes a good blog: To really work, Sierra observed, an entrepreneur’s blog has to be about something bigger than his or her company and his or her product. This sounds simple, but it isn’t. It takes real discipline to not talk about yourself and your company. Blogging as a medium [...]
Apropos my previous post: He despaired of the weakness of mind that ran in his family. “The ‘race is for the strong,’ ” Darwin wrote. “I shall probably do little more but be content to admire the strides others made in Science.” Darwin, of course, was wrong; his recurring fits didn’t prevent him from succeeding [...]
A meta-lesson: Microeconomics ain’t easy, and don’t let a regression–or division by a baseline–be a substitute for clear thought. It’s a classic error to analyze a decision as if it were a one-time choice, without recognizing the underlying incentives that make the situation come up repeatedly. It’s disappointing to see Levitt make this mistake and [...]
As a former database monkey, I have a lot of sympathy for Harry: If you have not delved into the thousands of e-mail messages and files hacked from the computers of British climate scientists, let me give you the closest thing to an executive summary. It is taken from a file slugged HARRY_READ_ME, which is [...]
The longest episode narrated in Brother West is its account of the conflict with Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, starting in October 2001. West reports that Summers began their now-legendary meeting by indicating that they should join forces against the neoconservative Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield. “Help me f___ him up,” said Summers (according [...]
The turning point came in 1999, when Calagione was watching a cooking show on television. The chef, who was making a soup, was saying that several grindings of pepper, added to the pot at different points, would give the dish more flavor than a single dose added at the beginning. Not long afterward, at a [...]
The announcers mentioned this during the game: 5. Colt McCoy. It’s not enough that the guy has won 38 games as a collegiate starter. Or that he completed an NCAA record 77 percent of his passes last season. It’s that he’s the starting quarterback for the University of Texas and his name is COLT MCCOY. [...]
The fact that McChrystal is tough enough and disciplined enough to go running at 4:30 in the morning and visit Afghan markets without a sidearm or a bulletproof vest is not relevant to the questions at hand. But it’s made to seem relevant. As if all the past tacticians who saw their careers and countries [...]