Tom Wolfe, who calls himself “the social secretary of neuroscience,” often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died,” raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Tom Wolfe + Michael Gazzaniga

Kurt Vonnegut:

Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it? Do so as a mark of respect for your readers, whatever you're writing. If you scribble your thoughts any which way, your readers will surely feel that you care nothing about them. They will mark you down as an egomaniac or a chowderhead --- or, worse, they will stop reading you.

How to Write With Style

What does it mean to be a liberally educated person? It seems such a simple question ...

In speaking of “liberal” education, we certainly do not mean an education that indoctrinates students in the values of political liberalism, at least not in the most obvious sense of the latter phrase. Rather, we use these words to describe an educational tradition that celebrates and nurtures human freedom.

Freedom and growth: here, surely, are values that lie at the very core of what we mean when we speak of a liberal education.

Here are the ten personal qualities I most admire in the people I know who seem to embody the values of a liberal education. How does one recognize liberally educated people?

From the recent archive:

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Only Connect: The Goals of a Liberal Education

Hitotoki is an online literary project collecting stories of singular experiences tied to locations in cities worldwide.

The word Hitotoki is a Japanese noun comprised of two components: hito or “one” and toki or “time,” and is often translated as “a moment.”

Cities include New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Sofia.

hitotoki : A Narrative Map of the World

As a reverse (chronological) follow-up on The Random Wok:

This is the coolest restaurant. It's called Wiki Wiki Teriyaki, and it's in Austin, a few blocks from the convention center.

Rather than having a set menu, they just have a bunch of ingredients and invite you to bring your own. The diners, who call themselves "recipedians," get to put together their own recipes and have them cooked. Other diners can then build on each other's recipes and discuss them, creating a seemingly limitless array of recipes. Soon they'll add ratings and tags to make it easier for diners to parse their options.

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki: Restaurant 2.0

The Social Graph is a misleading distraction, a handy buzzword we can all slip into our cocktail conversations. But the real value is in the personal, independent social graph we all have. Plural.

If you think about it, that’s the only way you can really make sense of it in our user-centric, user-driven world.

Joe Andrieu should see the graphs at MemeStreams; maybe Jello is right about sharing the graphs with ET. It's less about the choice of layout and more about the conceptualization.

Social Graph is Plural

Just as many of New York City’s most iconic landmarks rose in breathtakingly brief succession a century ago, Beijing has been re-inventing itself since 2001 with a rush of showstopping buildings by internationally renowned architects: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron’s National Stadium, Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid complex, Rem Koolhaas’s China Central Television headquarters, and Norman Foster’s Terminal 3. On the eve of a controversial Olympics, Kurt Andersen sees China’s true promise in a more enduring spectacle of daring commissions, bravura engineering, and creatively humanistic design.

From Mao to Wow!

War is unique, but the same point holds in other contexts, including the domain of climate change, in which costly precautions inevitably create risks. This is not to say that we should not take action to avert the dangers posed by climate change; we should. But if we take steps to reduce risks, we will always create fresh hazards. No choice is risk-free. For environmental and other problems, we need to decide which risks to combat - not comfort ourselves with the pretense that there is such a thing as a "safe" choice.

The nations of the world should take precautions, certainly. But they should not adopt the precautionary principle.

Throwing precaution to the wind

It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This paper discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this period do so at some risk.

Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status

Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads.

When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...

Engineers' Dreams, by George Dyson