Articles 2026
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Designs for Living
On the architecture of (commercial) desire
The Weekly Standard, January 19, 2015
Review of Packaged Pleasures: How Technology and Marketing Revolutionized Desire by Gary S. Cross and Robert N. Proctor and Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure by Samira Kawash -
The Glamour of Islamic State
Bloomberg View, January 06, 2015
Confronting Islamic State requires an exercise largely unfamiliar to the American military’s hardheaded pragmatists: thinking carefully about the elusive, seductive magic of glamour. Making that task all the more difficult, it also demands recognizing the allure of ideas and images that baffle, offend or horrify most Westerners. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, glamour is in the mind of the audience.
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Old, Sick and Need a Kidney? Good Luck
Bloomberg View, December 08, 2014
Within a few years, new rules about allocating kidneys could shrink the waiting list. But this apparent improvement will be an illusion -- an artifact of the incentives the new rules create, not genuine progress
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A Flier's Idea for Peace in the Middle Seat
Bloomberg View, December 01, 2014
Ending the war between between passengers who expect to recline and passengers who feel equally entitled to use their trays and flex their knees.
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Harvard Deserves Steve Ballmer's Millions
Bloomberg View, November 21, 2014
Excellence, as well as need, is worthy of support.
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Who Killed Wikipedia?
Pacific Standard, November/December 2014
A hardened corps of volunteer editors is the only force protecting Wikipedia. They might also be killing it. -
3-D Printers Are Cameras, Not Printers
Bloomberg View, October 31, 2014
Contrary to what the names suggest, a desktop 3-D printer today isn’t analogous to a 2-D desktop printer in the 1980s.
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How Candy Conquered Halloween
Bloomberg View, October 30, 2014
Q&A with Samira Kawash, author of Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure, discussing how candy became the Halloween treat and how the myth of the Halloween sadist helped big candy brands.
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Oscar de la Renta's Last Stand Against Slobs
Bloomberg View, October 21, 2014
Will the American fashion industry ever tolerate another Oscar de la Renta?
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Peter Thiel Is Wrong About the Future
Bloomberg View, October 08, 2014
The obstacle to greater technological ambitions isn't our idea of the future. It's how we think about the present and the past.