Articles 2024
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We'll choose an NSA life, on camera all the time
Imagine a constantly transparent life
USA Today, September 04, 2014
In the late 1990s, physicist and sci-fi author David Brin argued that tiny cameras were creating "the transparent society." The only question was who would control the recordings. Since then, debates over surveillance have mostly focused on government surveillance. But imagine a different future: -
A Hospital Room With a View
Bloomberg View, August 24, 2014
Hospitals are, by their nature, scary and depressing places. But they don’t have to be ugly as well -- and there’s ample evidence that aesthetics matter to patient health.
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Off to College? Avoid Herpes 101
Bloomberg View, August 15, 2014
20 tips for parents and students on how to stay healthy at college.
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Are Hipsters Ruining the South?
Bloomberg View, August 11, 2014
Should the Piedmont area of the Carolinas and Georgia have stayed a poor region of mill villages and farms? Should prosperity be a first-come-only-served condition? Do new houses represent prosperity in the Northeast but pollution in the South?
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Why Being a Part-Time Worker Is Miserable
Bloomberg View, July 29, 2014
If unreliable schedules are so burdensome, why don’t workers switch to jobs with better schedules but lower pay? Why don’t competitors offer such options?
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Political Victory Punctures Illusions
Second in a conversation on Visual Persuasion and Politics
Cato Unbound, July 21, 2014
Political victory is like meeting your idol or getting your dream job. It punctures the illusion, revealing the contradictions, difficulties, and flaws hidden in the glamorous idea of a world transformed. -
The Deadly Quest for Grace
Third in a conversation on Visual Persuasion and Politics
Cato Unbound, July 21, 2014
Glamour, like legitimacy, survives only behind a “well-wrought veil” that reveals only partial truths. -
Amazon Is Going All Netflix on Book Publishers
Bloomberg View, July 17, 2014
Amazon has been quietly testing a Kindle subscription service offering an unlimited number of digital books for $9.99 a month, the tech site Gigaom reported yesterday. The bundled pricing model makes a lot of sense, but it’s hard to pull off.
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Turning College into a No-Thought Zone
Bloomberg View, July 14, 2014
Zones that quarantine speech on public college campuses violate both the First Amendment and the mission of higher education.
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No Fireworks on the Fourth of July: Visual Persuasion and Politics
First in a conversation
Cato Unbound, July 07, 2014
Images are so ubiquitous they’ve been called “the lingua franca of politics.”We can no more escape them than we can shed the human characteristics that make visual rhetoric effective. Whether conjured with words or presented in pigments or pixels, images speak to our social, sensory, and emotional natures. Those aspects of human nature aren’t going to disappear just because intelligent, articulate people try to ignore or suppress them. Instead of dismissing, neglecting, or condemning the power of images, therefore, it makes sense to try to understand how they work and what different forms of visual persuasion might tell us about the relation between political audiences and those who seek to influence them.