Ideas

Examining last week’s Verge-vs-Sullivan “Google ruined the web” debate, author Elizabeth Tai writes: I don’t know any class of user more abused by SEO and Google search than the writer. Whether they’re working for their bread [and] butter or are just writing for fun, writers have to write the way Google wants them to just […]

The post Algorithm & Blues appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.

Genealogy is fun, but it has never been an entirely innocent pastime. The establishment (or fabrication) of pedigrees has been essential to the policing of social and racial hierarchies. The Nazis, however, made it a murderous obsession. A banal family record could be a license for advancement or a death warrant. According to the historian […]

The post The Trouble with Ancestry appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

“Ideas in which economists have reposed the greatest confidence have been proved wrong and therewith, not surprisingly, the responding policy. And this has happened under circumstances which admit of no really plausible explanation, rationalization, or alibi—things in which we economists are more than minimally accomplished. There was, to be sure, more than a suspicion of […]

by Ben Clift* Political economy has long taken a keen interest in the politics of economic ideas, but considerably less attention has been paid to the politics of economic method. Method gets neglected as the technical realm within which, it is assumed economic ideas, once established, are implemented in straightforward fashion. In fact, economic method […]

The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application […]

The post The Lie of Nation Building appeared first on The New York Review of Books.