The distribution of wealth follows a well-known pattern sometimes called an 80:20 rule: 80 percent of the wealth is owned by 20 percent of the people. Indeed, a report last year concluded that just eight men had a total wealth equivalent to that of the world’s poorest 3.8 billion people.
Category: Random
End of Discussion
This will be impossible to tweet. It always is. How do you siphon 2,500 words into 280 characters? More importantly, how do you turn a measured thesis into something interesting, and by interesting I mean shareable, and by shareable I mean divisive.
The presidential candidates sure use a lot — a whole lot — of em dashes
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidates — bless their hearts — have a real affinity for a particular type of punctuation. And no — it’s not the semicolon.
I Took a Road Trip Through Syria — And This is What I Saw
I almost ignored the explosion at first. Loud noises weren’t unusual here in Qamishli, and I’d already heard jackhammers that could have been mistaken for gunfire throughout the day. Maybe I shouldn’t ignore that one, I thought.
Lingua Franca
In the 11th century, sailors in the Mediterranean developed a pidgin language to communicate with one another, a mix of Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Occitan, French, Latin, English, and other languages in which they could conduct trade and diplomacy.
All your favorite songs reimagined as vintage book covers. (You’re welcome.)
This morning, Open Culture pointed me to the work of screenwriter and graphic artist Todd Alcott, who—when he’s not writing movies—translates his favorite songs into vintage book covers, mostly of the pulp fiction and mid-century modern variety, but with some other genres (nature guides, self-
3 Smart Ways to Keep Yourself From Rambling
Have you ever walked away from a meeting or a conversation face-palming, thinking things like, What was I thinking? Why did I run on like that? Or, I can’t believe I didn’t know when to stop talking! It’s not uncommon.
The peak–end rule
The peak–end rule predicts that your memory of an experience strongly correlates with the average of how you feel at the peak of the experience and the end of the experience. Have you ever thought about how strange it is that the moment you’re experiencing right now will never happen again?
One Year After ‘The Big Hack’
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Bloomberg’s publication of a story about Chinese intelligence intercepting the supply chain of Supermicro, a company which has built and sold servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and dozens of other companies.
Addicted to Screens? That’s Really a You Problem
Nir Eyal, who wrote the industry manual for hooking people on tech, now has a recipe to free you — even though it was your fault to begin with.