Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

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The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592

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How can you look out for the interests of working people with Tim Geithner whispering in one ear and Larry Summers in the other?

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=542249&f=28&sub=Columnist&p=1

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Wealthy people and corporate managers shouldn't dominate politics or have more and better speech rights than the rest of us. That seems like an obvious truth. And yet the Supreme Court's recent decisions move us away from it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2242210/pagenum/2

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Hope did him in.

http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/344785707/after-massachusetts-his-hopes-did-him-in

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But we have never identified excellent teachers in any reliable, objective way. Instead, we tend to ascribe their gifts to some mystical quality that we can recognize and revere—but not replicate. The great teacher serves as a hero but never, ironically, as a lesson.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/201001/good-teaching

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