Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt
via Hans Pieper
Why I Prefer Pro
I’m not a big sports enthusiast, but I’ve always been more interested in professional sports. I was never sure why I had that preference, but Taylor Branch’s article, The Shame of College Sports expresses why I prefer pro.
For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.
…
Slavery analogies should be used carefully. College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as “student-athletes” deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch an unmistakable whiff of the plantation. Perhaps a more apt metaphor is colonialism: college sports, as overseen by the NCAA, is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized. But it is, nonetheless, unjust. The NCAA, in its zealous defense of bogus principles, sometimes destroys the dreams of innocent young athletes.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.
Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via
City Math
Author Jonah Lehrer reports on Geoffrey West’s attempt to understand how cities work.
[C]ities are valuale because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”
West also examines the differences between the groupings of people who make up cities and the groupings of people who make up companies.
For West, the impermanence of the corporation illuminates the real strength of the metropolis. Unlike companies, which are managed in a top-down fashion by a team of highly paid executives, cities are unruly places, largely immune to the desires of politicians and planners. “Think about how powerless a mayor is,” West says. “They can’t tell people where to live or what to do or who to talk to. Cities can’t be managed, and that’s what keeps them so vibrant. They’re just these insane masses of people, bumping into each other and maybe sharing an idea or two. It’s the freedom of the city that keeps it […]
This story was published in the New York Times Magazine a while ago now, but it still answers some interesting questions about the draw and efficiencies of cities.
What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.
Design like nobody’s watching [comic]
via holykaw
Do This
31 Step Financial Tuneup
This is old but still useful. The New York Times has a personal finance check list with tons of useful links, calculators, videos, and other tools and media.
Taking time out to put your personal finances in gear can reap both immediate and long-term benefits, from cashing gift cards to reallocating investments. This checklist can help you formulate a strategy, providing tips, the time needed to achieve them, and links to additional resources. For each category, Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist, offers his insights on video. You can customize your list by removing items to suit your strategy, and then print a personalized list of the items you plan on tackling today.
A great thing about this check list is that it answers more than just the what. It also breaks down why each item is important, how to go about taking care of it, and about how long it should take.
We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! ‘The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!’ groans some solitary thinker. ‘Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,’ replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride.
from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky