50 Cent is My Life Coach →

Zach Baron:

50 Cent thinks for a minute. Actually, he says, my girlfriend—the one I just mentioned, the one I'd just moved in with? 50 Cent would like her to make a vision board, too. Then we're going to compare. "Take things out of your folder and things out of her folder to create a folder that has everything," he says. "Now the vision board is no longer your personal vision board for yourself: It's a joint board." That joint board will represent what we have in common. It will be a monument to our love.

If you woke up this morning and thought, today will be the day I read a super interesting think piece that involves 50 Cent and relationship theory and vision boards, guess what: you were right.

/via kottke.org

The Overprotected Kid →

Hannah Rosin:

I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life. My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.

It took me a while to get around to reading this piece. Part of the reason I kept putting it off was because I couldn’t see how it wouldn’t just turn into a “kids these days/in my day” soliloquy. And it mostly does. There’s no hard data to back up the assertion that boring playgrounds are responsible for restless children, and while there is hard data to back up that injury rates haven’t really fallen with the advent of “safer” playground equipment, the author conveniently forgets to point out that there’s no way for us to know if they wouldn’t have risen had the equipment not gotten safer. I completely agree with the attention over-saturation issue, though, and I’ve already got my one year-old on a schedule that includes several times a day where she’s free to wander without interference from me.

‘With fire, almost everything is counterintuitive.’

The Atlantic:

Massive wildfires cost billions of dollars and burn millions of acres in the U.S. every year, but we know surprisingly little about the basic science of how they spread. At the Fire Lab in Missoula, Montana, researchers reverse-engineer spreading fires using wind tunnels, fire-whirl generators, and giant combustion chambers.

Come for the science, stay for the gorgeous fire test visuals.

/via Devour

It’s Time For the U.S. to Use the Metric System →

Susannah Locke:

The measuring system that the United States uses right now isn't really a system at all. It's a hodgepodge of various units that often seem to have no logical relationship to one another, units collected throughout our history here and there, bit by bit. Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, 1,760 yards in a mile.

The metric system, by contrast, was intentionally created with ease and simplicity in mind. And as a result, it's incredibly efficient to use. All you need to do is multiply or divide by some factor of ten. 10 millimeters in a centimeter, 100 centimeters in a meter, 1,000 meters in a kilometer. Water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C.

Pretty convincing case, although I’m not really somebody who needed much convincing in the first place. But in a country home to a sizable population of folks who don’t believe in vaccinations or evolution, believe that airplanes are dusting us with mind control chemicals, and say that the jury is still out on a fact agreed upon by 97% of the experts studying it—I’m not going to hold my breath.

Beatlemania, 1964 →

View fullsize

Another outstanding In Focus collection:

At the start of 1964, the Beatles were at the top of the charts in the UK, but had just started to attract audiences overseas with songs from their first two albums Please Please Me and With the Beatles. Radio airplay and a broad marketing campaign in the U.S. quickly drove huge record sales and enormous enthusiasm among new fans -- the band and their sound were something new and exciting, and they were coming to America.

The Ultimate (and probably most expensive) Cup of Coffee in the World

And you thought my coffee making methods were fussy.

/via Devour

Publishers’ Deal with the Devil →

Ben Thompson:

The issue is that writing, editing, and publishing are all fixed costs; they are accrued before an article or book is published, and increasing the distribution of said article or book is, relative to these costs, completely free. The costs the Internet obviated, on the other hand, such as paper, ink, shipping, and retail space, were all variable costs; to create one additional book (or newspaper or magazine) required money. To put it another way, before the Internet free was not an option, and once customers were already paying something, it was a whole lot easier to get them to pay just a little bit more. And, with that little bit more, publishers could cover their fixed costs, and perhaps even turn a tidy profit.

As usual, another intensely rational, and at the same time, poetic, take from Ben Thompson. Did I maybe feel a surge of pride this some of his comments echoed my own? Maybe.

How the World’s Most Notorious Drug Lord Was Captured →

Patrick Radden Keefe:

On several occasions, authorities had come close to catching Guzmán. In 2004, the Mexican Army descended on a dusty ranch in Sinaloa where he was holed up, but he had advance warning and fled along a rutted mountain track in an all-terrain vehicle. Three years later, Guzmán married a teen-age beauty queen named Emma Coronel and invited half the criminal underworld of Mexico to attend the ceremony. The Army mobilized several Bell helicopters to crash the party; the troops arrived, guns drawn, to discover that Guzmán had just departed. American authorities have no jurisdiction to make arrests in Mexico, so whenever D.E.A. agents developed fresh intelligence about Guzmán’s whereabouts all they could do was feed the leads to their Mexican counterparts and hope for the best. In Washington, concerns about the competence of Mexican forces mingled with deeper fears about corruption. A former senior Mexican intelligence official told me that the cartel has “penetrated most Mexican agencies.” Was Guzmán being tipped off by an insider? After a series of near-misses in which Chapo foiled his pursuers by sneaking out of buildings through back doors, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City took to joking, bitterly, that there is no word in Spanish for “surround.”

I’m not one for True Crime tales, but this is probably the most exciting story you’ll read all month. It’s going to make a hell of a movie one day.

Legislative Explorer: Data Driven Discovery →

University of Washington Center for American Politics and Public Policy:

[LegEx is a] one of a kind interactive visualization that allows anyone to explore actual patterns of lawmaking in Congress.

Get the ‘big picture’
Compare the bills and resolutions introduced by Senators and Representatives and follow their progress from the beginning to the end of a two year Congress.

Dive deeper
Filter by topic, type of legislation, chamber, party, member, or even search for a specific bill.

This is incredible. This Vox article has a more in-depth explanation of it.

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day: ‘waiting in line; waiting on line.’

Bryan Garner:

waiting in line; waiting on line. The former is the standard American English expression. The latter is a regionalism in the Northeast, especially in New York. Although some might think that it's the product of the computer age (i.e., being "online"), in fact it dates back to the 19th century.

This came up during the editing process for “Whitney.” My Minnesota-based publisher initially balked against using it but, to their credit, they did let it stand.