History
Whatever Happened to the United Farmworkers?
On New Year’s Day, a friend mentioned that Frank Bardacke had published his long-anticipated history of the rise and fall of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers. It was worth the wait, he assured me and “completely stunning. Just get it and read it. You won’t put it down.” He was right. Bardacke, a respected [...]
Amazon.com: America’s #1 Tax Evader?
== Update: On September 7, Amazon relented and made a deal to pay sales taxes on shipments to California (no doubt the trenchant analysis that follows persuaded them to do the right thing). For details of the deal see http://goo.gl/kNwjQ. Now every other state in America needs to make a deal with Amazon — even if they [...]
Michael Lewis: When Capitalists Try to Destroy Capitalism
If the global financial collapse has a silver lining it’s the Vanity Fair accounts by Michael Lewis of how three different European countries responded to the meltdown. We can only hope that Lewis adds to these reports and turns them into another best-selling book. Lewis (Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short) is [...]
Mills College: Women’s Education in a Post-Male World
Towards the end of last year’s hit movie, The Kids are All Right, Nic and Jules (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore) drop off their daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) to begin her freshmen year at an attractive, unnamed college. The campus was gorgeous — its stately buildings and lawns captured the promise of a nourishing and provocative [...]
Finally — a People’s Diesel Comes to the US
I fell in love with diesel engines back when they had glow coils, sulfuric fuel, and took 30 seconds to start. Diesel was the sound and smell of progress in every real factory and many cities. What was not to like? For good reason, California never shared my enthusiasm. Diesel engines coughed up a lot of [...]
When will China overtake the US as the world’s largest economy? Place your bets…
The Economist has a useful tool. Plug in the variables and see when the Chinese economy gets larger than ours. (Hint, if you get a date before 2015 or after 2020, you are dreaming…)
Brad DeLong: Seven Reasons That Markets Work Well — and Seven Reasons That They Don’t.
Brad DeLong is an accomplished economic historian at Berkeley, a former Clinton official, and a pioneering blogger. His posts are a mix of uncommonly intelligent economic policy thoughts, useful links to other economists, and reflections about about technology. DeLong recently gave his students some well thought out advice: What Econ 1 Students Need to Remember Most from the [...]
Ben Horowitz: High Tech’s New Andy Grove
If Silicon Valley is rich, how come it ain’t smart? How is it that we consistently generate innovative companies but rarely produce management thinkers of consequence? Part of the problem is that many technology leaders are neurotic. They need to be: nobody really knows what is going to work and your idea will most likely [...]
Celebrating Cheap Crap from Africa
For reasons best known to her, my loving wife decided to wear a white skirt to our Fourth of July barbecue. But it was not the charred remains of salmon, beef, or tofu that did the skirt in. Before our guests had arrived, she noticed a blue stain spreading across her dress like the sky [...]
"Remember: Your Mother Owns a Bank"
The Jamkid and I caught Muhammad Yunus at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this afternoon. Yunus is the Bangladeshi banker who received the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microcredit loans to women. He also serves as the godfather of social enterpreneurship – the fashionable and laudable notion that many social causes are best organized [...]
The revolution will not be televised. It will be Tweeted, Blogged, and YouTubed.
Iran has crossed into promising and dangerous ground – that moment when political mobilization creates the possibility that chaos will give birth to progress or collapse in repression. Politics becomes a real and serious struggle as history either leaps forward or falls back based on the cumulative impact of thousands of people who cannot know [...]
How the Kindle Helps Destroy Textbooks
When Bill Clinton was elected President in the early 1990's, encyclopedias were a $1.2 billion dollar business in the US. The best encyclopedia, Britannica, owned half of the market and advertised "more than 80 Nobel laureates" among its contributors. A Britannica set cost over $1,000. They were sold door to door by over 2,000 commissioned [...]
Bicentennial of Heroes
Today two of my heroes celebrate their 200th birthdays. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born on February 12, 1809. Neither Lincoln nor Darwin were especially popular during their lifetimes and for different reasons, both were often caricatured as apes. Lincoln may be remembered as our greatest President, but he was also one of [...]
The Man Who Loves Scholars
I am a huge fan of Simon Winchester — a peripatetic Brit who writes brilliantly about geology, lexicography, and sinology. At his best, Winchester turns science into biography by demonstrating how an obscure scholar shaped our view of the world. Winchester majored in geology at Oxford and worked in the field for many years before [...]
Boycott the Beijing Olympics?
Christopher Hitchens: "Those who care or purport to care about human rights must start to discuss this problem in plain words. Is there an initiative to save the un-massacred remains of the people of Darfur? It will be met by a Chinese veto.. Does anyone care about Robert Mugabe treating his desperate population as if [...]
UC Berkeley and The Meaning of Diversity
Columbia University announced this week that they were opening up the campus to for visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There was no reason to invite this guy — who is, after all, one of the most dangerous people on the planet. He is a deeply anti-Semitic holocaust-denier who funds terrorism throughout the Middle East. He [...]
Outside of the Box
Nobel Prize winning physicist and genius quantum mechanic Niels Bohr once pointed out that "Prediction is difficult, especially about the future" — a fact that he demonstrated empirically with respect to subatomic particles. Former Economist writer and business historian Marc Levinson has demonstrated that the maxim applies to technology businesses as well in a business [...]
France Astonishes
I like the new French President Nicholas Sarkozy a lot — he’d make a good Democrat in the US. But this I did not expect. French volunteers near the U.S. Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy today formed a human chain to honor fallen U.S. troops in World War II. They formed the words "France Will Never [...]
Who is Norman Borlaug and Why is He our Greatest Living American?
For my money, the highest award a human being can receive is the Nobel Peace Prize — even if the process for determining the award makes it far from a perfect. Like the scientific awards, the Prize cannot be awarded posthumously. Unlike the scientific awards, the Peace Price is more often awarded for current contributions [...]
"No Power in the Market and No Voice in the System"
Bill Gates’ Harvard commencement address is being circulated widely in Silicon Valley — and with good reason. He gave an outstanding speech (rather, he wrote an outstanding speech — he cannot deliver a speech to save his life). In the tradition of commencement speeches, Gates reminded grads of their social obligations — a noblesse oblige [...]
