Happy Holidays....

...and as I am a great fan of cats, here's an interesting tale from the New York Times about some of the working cats of New York City. A snippet:

"Across the city, delis and bodegas are a familiar and vital part of the streetscape, modest places where customers can pick up necessities, a container of milk, a can of soup, a loaf of bread.

"Amid the goods found in the stores, there is one thing that many owners and employees say they cannot do without: their cats. And it goes beyond cuddly companionship. These cats are workers, tireless and enthusiastic hunters of unwanted vermin, and they typically do a far better job than exterminators and poisons."

Synthetic DNA: An Introduction

Have just caught up with this fascinating piece from the Washington Post, another sign of how science-fictional our world has become. A quote: "The cobbling together of life from synthetic DNA, scientists and philosophers agree, will be a watershed event, blurring the line between biological and artificial -- and forcing a rethinking of what it means for a thing to be alive."

The Writers' Strike: A New Development

The Los Angeles Times discusses an interesting development in the Writers Guild of America strike here. Matthew Yglesias offers this analysis: "The TV and movie studios business models are fundamentally all about controlling the channels of distribution -- the very thing the rise of the internet disrupts. But they still have a massive leg-up in the new medium simply because of all the embedded human capital in the form of relationships with the talent.

"They seem to have decided, however, that the dawning of the digital age is mostly a good time to try to claw back compensation from their workforce rather than a time when good relations with their workforce are becoming more important than ever in a world where control of the distribution channels is becoming less and less important."

IQ Tests

Once in a while, racism infects our public discourse, as it unfortunately seems to be doing again. Malcolm Gladwell discusses here what IQ tests measure and don't measure.

The (dying Art of) the American Essay

Cristina Nehring discusses here what's wrong with the American essay--and maybe it's why I prefer passionately misguided essays to the more righteous but laid-back variety.