As a student at Cornell, back in the day, I remember it as a fabulous place to be if you were feeling good—and a terrible place to be when you were sad. The winters last most of the year. The school is isolated from the rest of civilization. And worst of all, it seemed like you were always walking uphill. I don’t know how that is possible, but it definitely…
Just received the Polish paperback.. I like the dangling rope! Not too Hollywood, nor too Warsaw. As for the title, my handy online Polish-English translation service tells me that it means, roughly, “Survival Instinct.”
(Translator is at a loss to explain subtitle, aside from the obvious word for “catastrophe,” but we’ll hope for the best.)
When a man was stabbed to death early one morning on a NYC subway, a nervous passenger scrambled to pull the emergency brake, immediately stopping the train. Another example of an average citizen averting a disaster?
Not exactly.
TheNew York Times reported this week that the emergency brake is not to be pulled during an emergency. Well, actually, the emergency brake should only be pulled during certain kinds of emergencies, and it’s up to you to know what constitutes an emergency and what doesn’t. In this particular instance, the immediate stopping of the…
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been wondering: Is this all just manufactured hysteria? Are Americans as freaked out by the failed bomb plot as much as the people on their TV screens?
CNN has a new poll out today that suggests regular people are not the ones with the problem (full results in a PDF here). Americans, it seems, don’t scare nearly as easily as their leaders and their reporters.
* Percent of Americans who say they are very or somewhat worried that they or someone in their family will become a victim of a terrorist attack:
OK, I make my living off words. But there are some things that words can never really capture. To accompany my story on What Makes a Great Teacher, the Atlantic has posted three videos of highly effective teachers, courtesy of Teach For America. These are teachers who are…
I occasionally take a break from writing about risk and human behavior to write about education—a kind of slow-motion disaster. This fall, I spent months obsessing over an old puzzle, using very cool new tools. The question was, What makes some teachers truly exceptional—and others, well, unremarkable? The story, which appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine, is my attempt to solve the mystery.
I had a lot of help. I got access to a treasure trove of data from Teach for America, which has been studying this mystery…
Another emergency, another news story about ...(dramatic pause)... regular people behaving exactly as they normally do.
In Cape Cod yesterday, an ambulance got stuck in the snow on its way to help a man who had collapsed outside his home. Out of the haze, an untrained force of neighbors appeared. Five neighbors used snow blowers to clear the road ahead while the others dug out the snow around the ambulance with snow shovels. It took two hours, but the elite squad of regular people and emergency medical technicians…
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling is right to impose a 50% tax on banker bonuses, as announced earlier today. I know, I know: It could lead to an exodus of “talent,” as everyone in the financial “talent” industry likes to tell us. (Although that is less likely if more countries sign up for such a tax, reducing the number of alternative options for banks in search of relocation.) And I know that clever banks will find a way to slither out of some of the taxes. I don’t care. Fairness matters. Even if we can’t get fairness, it’s…
