Buzzkill

[ed. I wrote a short piece about this not too long after I-502 passed. See: Holding Our Breath.] 

One morning in August, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A., addressed the Seattle city council on the subject of marijuana. Kleiman is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken analysts of drug policy, and for three decades he has argued that America’s cannabis laws must be liberalized. Kleiman’s campaign used to seem quixotic, but in November, 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives legalizing the use and commercial sale of marijuana. Immediately afterward, the State of Washington decided that it needed help setting up a pot economy. State bureaucrats don’t generally sit around pondering the improbable, so they had made no contingency plans. A call for proposals was issued. Kleiman assembled a team that beat out more than a hundred other contenders for the job. He calls himself a “policy entrepreneur,” and offers advice through a consultancy that he runs, botec Analysis Corp. In a nod to the ambiguity inherent in studying illicit economies, botec stands for Back of the Envelope Calculation.

Washington and Colorado have launched a singular experiment. The Netherlands tolerates personal use of marijuana, but growing or selling the drug is still illegal. Portugal has eliminated criminal sanctions on all forms of drug use, but selling narcotics remains a crime. Washington and Colorado are not merely decriminalizing adult possession and use of cannabis; they are creating a legal market for the drug that will be overseen by the state. In a further complication, the marijuana that is legal in these states will remain illegal in the eyes of the federal government, because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 forbids the growing and selling of cannabis. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Kleiman says. In late August, after months of silence, the Department of Justice announced that it will not intervene to halt the initiatives in Washington and Colorado. Instead, it will adopt a “trust but verify” approach, permitting the states to police the new market for the drug. Many other states appear poised to introduce legalization measures, and the Obama Administration’s apparent acquiescence surely will hasten this development.

Washington’s initiative, called I-502, received fifty-six per cent of the vote, with especially strong support in western Washington, around Seattle. Voters saw a lot to like: the end of prohibition of a drug that many people enjoy and consider harmless; a fresh source of tax revenue; an end to the punitive, and racially discriminatory, enforcement of marijuana laws. Each year, U.S. authorities make more than three-quarters of a million arrests for marijuana offenses. Blacks are more than three times as likely to be arrested for such offenses as whites are, though they are no more likely to use the drug. Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, told me that state prosecutors had stopped indicting people for marijuana possession, because local jurors found the prohibition so objectionable that they tended to acquit on principle. A few years ago, Holmes stopped prosecuting misdemeanor marijuana-possession cases. He then publicly endorsed I-502.

The law, which was sixty-four pages long and contained hundreds of specific provisions, assigned the liquor-control board the role of regulating the pot market. Yet many difficult questions remained: Who would be allowed to grow legal marijuana? Who would be allowed to sell it? How much would an ounce of legal pot cost? The legislation gave Washington officials only a year to come up with answers. Randy Simmons, the state’s project manager for I-502, says, “From the week after the initiative passed, it’s been about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

The liquor-control board instructed Kleiman and his associates at botec to submit research papers outlining the advantages and disadvantages of rival approaches to legalization. They were to be paid two hundred and ninety-two dollars an hour. In the spring and summer, Kleiman’s team engaged in the often surreal enterprise of conducting market research on a black market: producing reports on the number of active marijuana users in each county; estimating how many retail cannabis outlets would be needed to serve that population; assessing how various tax schemes might affect the price of the drug. They also investigated protocols for “product quality standards and testing.” Kleiman’s mandate was to offer officials options, rather than prescriptions. But he has a lot of opinions, and does not excel at hiding them.

If Seattle has welcomed the legalization of marijuana with utopian optimism—a conviction that Washington’s experiment will eventually sweep the nation—then Kleiman can seem like a total downer. Allergic to cant, he speaks with the bracing candor of a scientist in a disaster movie, and appears to derive grim pleasure from informing politicians that they have underestimated the complexity of a problem.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Maureen Drennan

David Hockney, A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967
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R. Crumb
Image source: misplaced

Bill Gate's Super-Condom

It's been hailed as the new wonder-material, set to revolutionise everything from circuit boards to food packaging, a magic super-strength membrane that is barely there at all. Now, thanks to the unlikely sex champion Bill Gates, graphene could be used to make the thinnest, lightest, most impenetrable condom ever conceived.

“The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” says Dr Papa Salif Sow, senior program officer on the HIV team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has awarded $100,000 (£60,000) to scientists at the University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute to aid their pursuit of the ultimate super-sheath. “A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty.”

At only one atom thick, an all-graphene condom would put the Durex Ultra Thin to shame – although the fact that the material is barely visible to the naked eye could lead to some awkward moments between the sheets. A slight ruffle of the duvet and could it just float away?

Dr Aravind Vijayaraghavan, who will lead the research team, explains the focus is on developing a composite material, with latex, “tailored to enhance the natural sensation during intercourse while using a condom, which should encourage and promote condom use.”

It will be achieved, he says, “by combining the strength of graphene with the elasticity of latex to produce a new material which can be thinner, stronger, more stretchy, safer and, perhaps most importantly, more pleasurable.”

by Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Niall Carson/PA

[ed. Upon encountering Duck Soup for the first time.]
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No, You Shut Up!

If you're a parent, you are probably familiar with being provoked into a blood vessel-popping rage that instantly overwhelms any resolution you might have made to stay calm. That's because kids are amazingly good at refining behaviors that they can turn to when they're upset or angry, especially in public, to make their parents even angrier—in fact, insanely angry. Let's just stand back for a moment and appreciate the virtuosity of the 6-year-old who trails along behind you every morning on the way to school wailing that you're mean because you make him wear an uncomfortable backpack or wrinkly socks, or the 9-year-old who demonstrates her budding independence and wit by being rude to you in front of others, or the 12-year-old who during an argument over chores shouts, "You don't care about anybody but yourself! You just want me to do all this stupid stuff around your stupid house because you're so selfish and lazy!" It's as if they had commissioned a study of the most effective ways to set you off and then implemented the findings with great care and foresight.

And yet there you go, rising to the bait. What's your standard move? The hard come-along arm yank? The livid pinch-and-shake combo? The point-by-point counterargument? "What? I'm selfish? I'm lazy? I changed your diapers and picked your nose and sat up with you all night long when you were sick! I work hard all day to support this family, and then I get home and I clean and I cook. ..."

There's really no satisfying response, is there? Decreeing an extravagantly harsh punishment may immediately address your sense of justice, but it's unlikely to make the annoying behavior go away, and once you calm down, you're unlikely to stick with the punishment, anyway. Grabbing, shaking, hitting, or screaming at your kid may stop the behavior and be cathartic for you, but only for a moment (after which you may well begin to feel bad for losing control of yourself and overreacting), and over time such responses will likely lead to further behavioral problems. Ignoring the unwanted behavior and finding ways to encourage its positive opposite will be most effective in getting rid of the unwanted behavior in the long run, but this approach won't satisfy your overwhelming short-term urge to do something right now that addresses and fits the crime.

It's difficult to work out a satisfying response to flagrant disrespect because you're typically in the grip of at least four distinct, only partially overlapping, and often conflicting motives: an emotional urge to do something with the anger surging up inside you, a moralistic impulse to dispense justice in proportion to the offense, a social obligation to show yourself and your child and any others who might be watching that you don't tolerate such behavior, and a practical intent to get rid of the problem so you don't have to put up with such hassles in the future.

When your child stages a scene in front of witnesses, the mixed motives—and the anger, now supercharged by humiliation—grow all the more complex and difficult to handle. Yes, sure, a vast body of psychological research tells you that any attention you give to a bad behavior, even if it's in the form of screaming and hitting and grounding your child for the rest of her life, will only reinforce that behavior, so it's best not to react, but your kid just called you an a--hole in front of the neighbors—unless you're B.F. Skinner or the Buddha, ignoring it is not an option. And, anyway, ignoring it won't make it go away. You need to do something.

So, what do you do?

Let's consider the immediate, long-term, and side effects of some common and not-so-common responses to a disrespectful provocation by your child.

by Alan Kazdin and Carlo Rotella, Slate | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Yuko Murata
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A Tune With A View

No matter where you are on the planet, a song is probably being written nearby. Ever since the Beatles accidentally persuaded anyone who could play an instrument that they must be able to compose songs on it, songwriting has become the most widely practised creative art. PRS for Music, the official song-licensing body, estimates that it registers 700,000 new musical works every year. That's just in Britain.

There are more songwriters—pro, semi-pro, would-be or simply deluded—than novelists, composers, screenwriters or painters. That must be because songwriting looks easy. Where novels and paintings require stamina, don't great songs simply materialise? Paul McCartney says the tune for "Yesterday" came to him in a dream. Keith Richards woke in the middle of the night and played the riff for "Satisfaction" into a tape recorder by his motel bed. Songwriters know the unease when their subconscious comes up with something good. Where did I pinch that from?

Even if the process clearly involves sweat, there is usually a moment when chords and words magically mesh. "Somewhere in a burst of glory/Sound becomes a song", Paul Simon sang, in one of the intricate compositions which he spends months polishing. Biographers and critics like to think the best songs are inspired by events, which is why they treasure so-called break-up albums. In fact they're usually inspired by nothing more than a chord change that seems worth repeating, a snatch of conversation that might make a title, and a studio booked for Monday.

All songwriters agree that the best ideas seem to alight upon them rather than coming from within. Waiting for the song fairy is the hardest part. Modern songwriters long for the structure of the music publisher's cell, the spur of a deadline. Chris Difford of Squeeze would rather do it for someone else: "I like to write to order. Like a tailor making a suit." Owen Parker, who has worked with Pet Shop Boys, talks yearningly of how the veteran Ervin Drake was told to come up with a song for an artist who was arriving the next day. In his notebook he found "song about ageing as if stages of your life were like wine"; 20 minutes later he had written "It Was a Very Good Year". "The best songs", says Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, "take exactly as long to write as the song lasts."

Jimmy Webb wrote "Wichita Lineman" when Glen Campbell, who had had a hit with his "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", demanded "another song about a city". Webb dashed off a song about the working man with the soul of a poet and found that Campbell had recorded it before he'd had time to fit it with the standard middle eight. It's widely regarded as the best record either man has been associated with.

For all the money lavished on videos, the words uttered in interviews, the dark arts of marketing and the occasional whisper of corruption, the music business remains at root a songs business. The destinies of large companies hinge on that one person staring into space in their attic, killing time on Twitter, contemplating another cup of coffee or a walk in the park, trying to banish all conscious thought apart from a silent prayer to the songwriting god that the next five minutes will bring the wisp of the idea that earns them immortality.

I spoke to a number of songwriters working in different fields to find out what's going through their heads when they write and what they're looking at as they wait for that inspiration to strike.

by David Hepworth, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Richard Wilkinson

November 22, 1963

[ed. 3rd Grade, studying in the library, a teacher burst in sobbing, 'They've shot and killed the President'. Until then I never knew someone could kill a President - he was like Superman - or that teachers could cry.]
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[ed. See also: The day that will live in infamy.]

Evolution's Other Narrative

During a recent meal with a friend who happens to be a successful engineer, I found myself drawn, as usual, into debate. Although our theological and political views diverge, he and I customarily find common ground in scientific epistemology. However, this time the topic was whether intelligent design should be taught in high schools. When I expressed incredulity at his support for teaching intelligent design, he said, “Brad, just look around us—survival of the fittest can’t be all that’s going on here, and I think it is important to respect people’s sensitivity to that.”

I reminded my friend that, because intelligent design argues for supernatural causes of natural phenomena, teaching it would undermine rational inquiry, together with students’ ability to eventually make the kind of scientific breakthroughs we are enjoying today. I pointed out the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project as an example, which is revealing how human health suffers when the health of the millions of microorganisms with which we’ve coevolved suffers. My friend’s simplistic interpretation of evolution as “survival of the fittest” left him ignorant even of the possibility of projects like this, which are based on evolutionary considerations of symbiosis. Evidently, educators—and certainly evolutionary specialists themselves—must broadcast a more nuanced story of evolutionary theory. Otherwise, future scientists and projects that inform better approaches to human health and global ecology will be sabotaged before they even emerge.

Science education has failed to overcome entrenched cultural ideals rooted not only in religion, but also in political philosophy. For those like my engineer friend trying to comprehend how magnificent structures of life emerge by means of “survival of the fittest,” skepticism is understandable. Popular appreciation for life’s complexity has far outpaced the popular interpretation of the evolutionary source of that complexity, which has remained stuck in 1864, when Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

When it comes to the story of evolutionary science, people know the name Charles Darwin, but most do not know the names Ivan Wallin or Lynn Margulis—two more recent, groundbreaking evolutionary theorists. Over the past several decades, these and other researchers have revealed that organisms’ cooperation and interdependence contribute more to evolution than competition. Symbiogenesis—the emergence of a new species through the evolutionary interdependence of two or more species—is at least as important in the history of life as survival of the fittest. Such insight has failed to gain traction in American minds—including those of American scientists—because of cultural history traceable back through the popularization of Adam Smith’s individualist philosophy. (...)

According to Margulis, the evolving relationships between microscopic organisms and other micro- and macroscopic organisms are the essence of the history of life. Despite scientists’ mid-century focus on eukaryotic life (organisms with larger cells featuring a bounded nucleus and organelles), the most prolific type of organism on Earth, bacteria, is prokaryotic (an organism without a bounded nucleus). Virtually all eukaryotic forms of life have adapted symbiotic associations with prokaryotic bacteria. Margulis was among the first Western scientists to attempt to popularize this fact. She spent virtually her entire career laboring to bring this mostly microscopic form of evolution to the macroscopic focus of her readers.

Margulis’s research in microbiology equipped her to verify and expand on Wallin’s symbiosis-centered theory. In 1966 she attempted to publish a summary of her perspectives on the evolution of complex life forms in “The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,” only to be rejected by more than a dozen scientific journals. When her article was finally published by the Journal of Theoretical Biology, criticism ensued. Nonetheless, the further Margulis pushed her symbiotic evolutionary theory, the more convinced she became that the emergence of eukaryotic cells a billion and a half years ago—a major evolutionary transition in the history of life—was the result of symbiogenesis.

In Margulis’s view, out of prokaryotic–prokaryotic symbiosis emerged eukaryotes. Out of prokaryotic–eukaryotic symbiosis emerged more competitive eukaryotes. And out of eukaryotic–eukaryotic symbiosis emerged multicellular life. The classic image of evolution, the tree of life, almost always exclusively shows diverging branches; however, a banyan tree, with diverging and converging branches is best. To this day, many scientists and most laypeople remain ignorant of this way of imagining evolution, which profoundly constricts how they imagine themselves.

by Bradford Harris, American Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, by Shoshanah Dubineer

Senate Limits Use of the Filibuster

[ed. There'll be lots of commentary on this (for example: here and here). The Republicans have been abusing the filibuster for a long time. Nice to see some sanity finally restored. And for those who say wait until the shoe's on the other foot, just look at the record.]

The Senate approved the most fundamental alteration of its rules in more than a generation on Thursday, ending the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees in response to the partisan gridlock that has plagued Congress for much of the Obama administration.

Furious Republicans accused Democrats of a power grab, warning them that they would deeply regret their action if they lose control of the Senate next year and the White House in years to come. Invoking the Founding Fathers and the meaning of the Constitution, Republicans said Democrats were trampling the minority rights the framers intended to protect. But when the vote was called, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader who was initially reluctant to force the issue, prevailed 52 to 48.

Under the change, the Senate will be able to cut off debate on executive and judicial branch nominees with a simple majority rather than rounding up a supermajority of 60 votes. The new precedent established by the Senate on Thursday does not apply to Supreme Court nominations or legislation itself.

It represented the culmination of years of frustration over what Democrats denounced as a Republican campaign to stall the machinery of Congress, stymie President Obama’s agenda, and block his picks to cabinet posts and federal judgeships by insisting that virtually everything the Senate approves must be done by a supermajority.

After repeatedly threatening to change the filibuster, Mr. Reid decided to follow through when Republicans refused this week to back down from their effort to keep Mr. Obama from filling any of three vacancies on the most powerful appeals court in the country.

This was the final straw for some Democratic holdouts against limiting the filibuster, providing Mr. Reid with the votes he needed to impose a new standard certain to reverberate through the Senate for years.

“There has been unbelievable, unprecedented obstruction,” Mr. Reid said as he set in motion the steps for the vote on Thursday. “The Senate is a living thing, and to survive it must change as it has over the history of this great country. To the average American, adapting the rules to make the Senate work again is just common sense.”

Republicans accused Democrats of irreparably damaging the character of an institution that in many ways still operates as it did in the 19th century, and of disregarding the constitutional prerogative of the Senate as a body of “advice and consent” on presidential nominations.

“You think this is in the best interest of the United States Senate and the American people?” asked the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, sounding incredulous.

“I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think,” he added.

Mr. Obama applauded the Senate’s move. “Today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal,” he told reporters at the White House. “It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations we can’t let it become normal.”

by Jeremy W. Peters, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

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We Do Not Need Another Cat

We are down a cat. It's still too upsetting to talk about (rural life, tentative open window policy, probable coyote, lifetime of horrible, horrible guilt for not sticking to indoor cat guns), but we used to have two cats, the correct number of cats, and now we have one cat. An indoor cat.

And we can't really face the idea of acquiring a second cat, because a) we're having a human baby in a few months, and b) First Cat never really liked having a second cat, and now that she's Only Cat, she's super-stoked about it and prances around like she owns the place, and c) that would involve formally admitting that Second Cat is gone for good.

But, you know, I read the shelter intake emails every morning, even though Second Cat has been almost certainly deceased for a month now, and so I literally page through dozens of pictures of homeless cats on a daily basis, and it makes me feel like a ghoul. Even though, bless 'em, homeless cats usually put on great bitchface for the camera, you know? The dogs have that plaintive "where's my mommy?" thing going, and the cats are all "get that out of my face. I don't need you! I don't need anyone!"

And you start thinking, maybe an elderly boy cat? Just some big orangey lump? But then First Cat is all, "I tolerated Second Cat because she was from the same Brooklyn feral cluster as me. We were basically sisters. Don't push your luck. Did you see what I did to the stuffed bobcat you bought for your nieces?"

I don't know.

by Nicole Cliff, The Hairpin |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost]

The Next Housing Crash

The iconic American single-family home was a housing model for a different era, when Baby Boomers were raising their kids, gas was cheap, and suburbia beckoned. But today, Boomers are preparing to retire and downsize, while many of their children are eager to live elsewhere, trading home ownership for rentals, suburbs for cities, two-car garages for more-compact living. Can the housing market alter course in time to accommodate everyone? And what will happen to the Boomers’ dream homes in the suburbs if no one lines up to buy them?

by Emily Badger, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: The Atlantic

They're Watching You at Work

[ed. My father used to be a corporate psychologist so I spent many hours with block diagrams and Rorscharch tests as a child. I wonder what he thought they revealed?]

The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught. And it can’t help but feel a little creepy. It requires the creation of a vastly larger box score of human performance than one would ever encounter in the sports pages, or that has ever been dreamed up before. To some degree, the endeavor touches on the deepest of human mysteries: how we grow, whether we flourish, what we become. Most companies are just beginning to explore the possibilities. But make no mistake: during the next five to 10 years, new models will be created, and new experiments run, on a very large scale. Will this be a good development or a bad one—for the economy, for the shapes of our careers, for our spirit and self-worth? Earlier this year, I decided to find out. (...)

Consider Knack, a tiny start-up based in Silicon Valley. Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.

When Hans Haringa heard about Knack, he was skeptical but intrigued. Haringa works for the petroleum giant Royal Dutch Shell—by revenue, the world’s largest company last year. For seven years he’s served as an executive in the company’s GameChanger unit: a 12-person team that for nearly two decades has had an outsize impact on the company’s direction and performance. The unit’s job is to identify potentially disruptive business ideas. Haringa and his team solicit ideas promiscuously from inside and outside the company, and then play the role of venture capitalists, vetting each idea, meeting with its proponents, dispensing modest seed funding to a few promising candidates, and monitoring their progress. They have a good record of picking winners, Haringa told me, but identifying ideas with promise has proved to be extremely difficult and time-consuming. The process typically takes more than two years, and less than 10 percent of the ideas proposed to the unit actually make it into general research and development.

When he heard about Knack, Haringa thought he might have found a shortcut. What if Knack could help him assess the people proposing all these ideas, so that he and his team could focus only on those whose ideas genuinely deserved close attention? Haringa reached out, and eventually ran an experiment with the company’s help.

Over the years, the GameChanger team had kept a database of all the ideas it had received, recording how far each had advanced. Haringa asked all the idea contributors he could track down (about 1,400 in total) to play Dungeon Scrawl and Wasabi Waiter, and told Knack how well three-quarters of those people had done as idea generators. (Did they get initial funding? A second round? Did their ideas make it all the way?) He did this so that Knack’s staff could develop game-play profiles of the strong innovators relative to the weak ones. Finally, he had Knack analyze the game-play of the remaining quarter of the idea generators, and asked the company to guess whose ideas had turned out to be best.

When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process. Knack identified six broad factors as especially characteristic of those whose ideas would succeed at Shell: “mind wandering” (or the tendency to follow interesting, unexpected offshoots of the main task at hand, to see where they lead), social intelligence, “goal-orientation fluency,” implicit learning, task-switching ability, and conscientiousness. Haringa told me that this profile dovetails with his impression of a successful innovator. “You need to be disciplined,” he said, but “at all times you must have your mind open to see the other possibilities and opportunities.”

What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out. If he and his colleagues were no longer mired in evaluating “the hopeless folks,” as he put it to me, they could solicit ideas even more widely than they do today and devote much more careful attention to the 20 people out of 100 whose ideas have the most merit.

Haringa is now trying to persuade his colleagues in the GameChanger unit to use Knack’s games as an assessment tool. But he’s also thinking well beyond just his own little part of Shell. He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers. Shell goes to extremes to try to make itself the world’s most innovative energy company, he told me, so shouldn’t it apply that spirit to developing its own “human dimension”?

by Don Peck, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Peter Yang

Arturo Agostino, Vorticella
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Foo Fighters