Everyone—Pro and Anti Vaxxers—Should Watch ‘NOVA: Vaccines—Calling the Shots’ →

Russell Saunders:

What the NOVA special makes clear is that to believe strongly in the importance of vaccination isn’t really an indication of bias. It’s merely to be aware of the mass of evidence that points to their safety and effectiveness. While the program does acknowledge that there are very rare occasions of severe reactions to vaccines, it doesn’t take one of those infuriating stances where both sides of the debate are treated as equally meritorious merely because they both happen to exist. Instead, viewers are given the facts about how valuable vaccines have been since they first became available for disease prevention.

You can find when and where to catch this incredibly important 42 minutes of television here.

Steve Jobs Limited His Children’s Usage of Technology →

Nick Bilton:

“So, your kids must love the iPad?” I asked Mr. Jobs, trying to change the subject. The company’s first tablet was just hitting the shelves. “They haven’t used it,” he told me. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”

I’m sure I responded with a gasp and dumbfounded silence. I had imagined the Jobs’s household was like a nerd’s paradise: that the walls were giant touch screens, the dining table was made from tiles of iPads and that iPods were handed out to guests like chocolates on a pillow.

Nope, Mr. Jobs told me, not even close.

While I certainly don’t think of Steve Jobs as a great source for parenting tips, I think there is something valuable to be taken from this article overall.

‘This disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.’ →

Sarah Yager:

At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M.

“We can’t sell that now,” the manager protests.

To which Burford replies, in his soft Piedmont drawl: “That’s my point.”

Burford, who is 79 years old, is disinclined to apple destruction. His ancestors scattered apple seeds in the Blue Ridge foothills as far back as 1713, and he grew up with more than 100 types of trees in his backyard orchard. He is the author of Apples of North America, an encyclopedia of heirloom varieties, and travels the country lecturing on horticulture and nursery design. But his preservationist tendencies stop short of the Red Delicious and what he calls the “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”

As we all begin our yearly autumnal pilgrimage to pay way more for apples (and cider doughnuts, and kettle corn, and lemonade, and funnel cake, and pizza, and turkey legs) than we ever would in the supermarket, please treat the above piece as a PSA. Help stop the scourge of the Red Delicious!

How the New York City Meatball Helped Build Italian-American Cuisine →

John Surico:

In truth, the iconic red sauce meatball—one of the foundational foods of Italian cuisine in the U.S.—has more to do with the New World than Naples. Its development, and its influence on what Italian-American cuisine would become in the U.S., is inextricably tied to New York City. This is the city where Italian-American became American, and where the meatball as we know it began.

Yet Italians have been making meatballs since the days of ancient Rome. So why does today's red sauce version look so unlike the meatballs you'll find in Italy?

If you’ve got an Italian heritage, and you’re from New York City, you should read this.

Bobby Jindal: “I’m Not an Evolutionary Biologist” →

Chris Mooney:

The reply brings to mind numerous other Republicans saying "I'm not a scientist" (or Marco Rubio's "I'm not a scientist, man") to dodge uncomfortable questions about scientific topics like evolution and climate change.

Is the earth round? The reality is that I’m not a cartographer.

The Death of Adulthood in American Culture →

A.O. Scott:

In suggesting that patriarchy is dead, I am not claiming that sexism is finished, that men are obsolete or that the triumph of feminism is at hand. I may be a middle-aged white man, but I’m not an idiot. In the world of politics, work and family, misogyny is a stubborn fact of life. But in the universe of thoughts and words, there is more conviction and intelligence in the critique of male privilege than in its defense, which tends to be panicky and halfhearted when it is not obtuse and obnoxious. The supremacy of men can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom.

This slow unwinding has been the work of generations. For the most part, it has been understood — rightly in my view, and this is not really an argument I want to have right now — as a narrative of progress. A society that was exclusive and repressive is now freer and more open. But there may be other less unequivocally happy consequences. It seems that, in doing away with patriarchal authority, we have also, perhaps unwittingly, killed off all the grown-ups.

A sprawling (if not a bit messy) examination of the American cultural landscape. Scott makes some great points. The only problem is that the people who don’t want to hear what he has to say is exactly who could stand to absorb it.

The Biggest Apple Watch Problem? Time is an Illusion →

The announcement of a new Apple product line is always a big event, and their recent unveiling of the Apple Watch (technically, the  WATCH) was no exception. I’ve specifically avoided forming any real opinions on a product that isn’t going to be released for another, at least, six months. (if you’re interested, though, I think the new messaging paradigm that they’re attempting to introduce with the watch is the real that’s-some-Jetsons-shit feature.) However, that hasn’t stopped the rest of the internet from weighing in.

Of course, if you wanted to do some reading, get some good, thoughtful feedback, you could read, say, “A Watch Guy’s Thoughts On The Apple Watch After Seeing It In The Metal” (via Daring Fireball). I know I shouldn’t be surprised, but damn—there’s an entire Watch Nerd World out there, apparently.

Or, if you’re (like me) nerdy and lame and not all totally there, you could dive into Dylan Matthews’ take:

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the just-revealed Apple Watch. Who wants to use a touchscreen that tiny? Why would I want to send my heartbeat to my friends (a real feature of the watch emphasized in the product's unveiling)? Why should people who aren't titans of finance spend $349 on a watch?

But the best reason for skepticism is that it's, at root, a watch, with the primary purpose of telling time. And time is an illusion.

Now that’s a think piece.

‘Some of them dug for answers in the mess, but the rest were looking for trouble.’

It being 9/11 and all, I’ve seen the requisite “Never Forget”’s and calls for the blessing of a certain country from capital-G God and the linking to of new think pieces written to—commemorate, I guess?

I don’t know. I thought it would be more useful, and maybe even more helpful, to link to a couple of things that were created in the moment:

“Tuesday, and After,” compiled by The New Yorker:

In the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, New Yorker staff writers and contributors reflect on the tragedy and its consequences. This week’s Talk of the Town is devoted entirely to the incident, and includes contributions from John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim.

“Fear & Loathing in America,” by Hunter S. Thompson:

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy.

And finally, (lyrics here) Sage Francis’ “Makeshift Patriot”:

How Staten Island Is Fighting a Raging Heroin and Prescription Pill Epidemic →

Ian Frazier:

Staten Island has a lot of tattoo parlors, Italian delicatessens, two-story office buildings with empty spaces to rent, massage therapists, car services, Italian restaurants, places that give rock-music lessons and host children’s birthday parties, laundromats, liquor stores, tire shops, nail parlors, foot spas, pet-grooming salons, hair salons, barbershops (“buzz cuts, fades, tape-ups”). A small-business miscellany, sprung from the borough’s abundant middle-class life, lines the bigger roads like Hylan Boulevard from one end of the island to the other.

Most Staten Island enterprises are as their signs describe them. Occasionally, one or two storefronts that look no different from the rest also do a steady, word-of-mouth business in the illegal sale of OxyContin, oxycodone, Percocet, and other prescription painkillers. A neighborhood ice-cream truck playing its jingle might also be selling pills, according to police, who keep an eye on ice-cream trucks. A window-blinds and drapery store sold oxycodone pills until the N.Y.P.D. arrested one of the owners and the store closed. At a barbershop called Beyond Styles, on Giffords Lane, in the Great Kills neighborhood, police arrested the owner and two accomplices in October of 2013 for selling oxycodone and other drugs—two thousand pills a week, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The silent sniper fire of overdoses from pills and heroin that has been picking people off one at a time in increasing numbers all over the country for almost twenty years has hit Staten Island harder than anyplace else in the city. For a number of reasons, this borough of four hundred and seventy thousand-plus people offers unusually good entry routes for the opioid epidemic. In 2012, thirty-six people on Staten Island overdosed on heroin and thirty-seven on prescription opioid pills, for an average of almost exactly one overdose death every five days. Many of the dead have been young people in their late teens to early thirties. In this self-contained place, everybody seems to know everybody, and the grief as the deaths accumulate has been frantic and terrified.

Why 'Nano-Degrees' Can Never Replace Liberal Arts Colleges →

Michael Roth:

As the president of Wesleyan University, and somebody who has been teaching college students for 30 years, I’m very skeptical about the current re-fashioning of vocational education under the banner of Silicon Valley sophistication. We do need experiments integrating technology and pedagogy. That’s why I’ve been teaching online courses with my Wesleyan colleagues over the last two years. We’ve reached almost a million students in that time and continue to learn from working together. But we teach students online in the same way we do on campus: with the goal of broadening their thinking while sharpening their skills.

There are many, many problems currently plaguing higher education. But trying to change the definition to include the training of people in only one skill set is an obvious mistake.