What If We Never Run Out of Oil? – Charles C. Mann – The Atlantic

New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle—and a nightmare.

Before Housing Bubbles, There Was Land Fever – NYTimes.com - Shilling

Think Again: Austerity – By Anders Aslund | Foreign Policy

The big spenders are wrong: Maintaining sustainable budgets is essential to economic growth.

News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian

How Cubans’ Health Improved When Their Economy Collapsed – Richard Schiffman – The Atlantic

Start-Up Lets Users Track Who Tracks Them – NYTimes.com

Most of the tracking is in the service of advertising: If you were browsing a camping goods site over the weekend, for instance, don’t be surprised to see an ad pop up for hiking boots when you log in to a news site the next morning or even, when you open up your Facebook page.

The Case For and Against Thatcherism : The New Yorker

I’m willing to give the old devil her due. But let’s not get carried away. “Margaret Thatcher had more impact on the world than any woman ruler since Catherine the Great of Russia,” Paul Johnson wrote in the Wall Street Journal. In the Times, David Brooks, perhaps confusing her for the Count of Cavour, said that she led a “fervent bourgeois Risorgimento.” Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner described her as “the greatest peacetime prime minister in British history.” Even allowing for a bit of grade inflation since the days of Peel and Gladstone and Disraeli, such comments are over the top

Frank Rich on the State of Journalism — New York Magazine

Why the Euro Is Doomed in 4 Steps – Matthew O’Brien – The Atlantic

In the beginning, it was just the “Greek debt crisis”. Then markets realized Portugal, Ireland, Italy, and Spain were in bad shape too, and the PIIGS (or GIIPS) were born. But now Cyprus and Slovenia have run into trouble as well, giving us the … SIC(K) PIGS? At this rate, we’re going to have to buy a vowel soon, assuming Estonia doesn’t end up needing a bailout.

CourseSmart E-Textbooks Track Students’ Progress for Teachers – NYTimes.com

A Wild Country Grows in South Sudan | Sudan | OutsideOnline.com

The Unintended (and Deadly) Consequences of Living in the Industrialized World - Smithsonian

For all the sophisticated analysis involved, the theory that Knip is testing couldn’t be more basic. He thinks the key difference between the two populations is…dirt. In a sense, he wonders if kids in Finland, and in the United States and other developed nations as well, are too clean for their own good.

Buzzkill? How Climate Change Could Eventually End Coffee – US News and World Report

Millions around the world wake up and brew a cup of coffee before they start their day. But for many involved in the industry, a caffeine buzz isn’t keeping them up at night—instead, what’s causing insomnia is the increasing difficulty that climate change causes coffee farmers.

13 Trends That Will Define Global Business

He Has Millions and a New Job at Yahoo. Soon, He’ll Be 18. – NYTimes.com

One of Yahoo’s newest employees is a 17-year-old high school student in Britain. As of Monday, he is one of its richest, too. That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to the company on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Everything you think you know about poverty is wrong | Deseret News

Cyprus and Russia Did Not Just Break Up | Foreign Affairs

Mayor Bloomberg’s Geek Squad – NYTimes.com

Now the city has brought this quantitative method to the exceedingly complicated machine that is New York. For the modest sum of $1 million, and at a moment when decreasing budgets have required increased efficiency, the in-house geek squad has over the last three years leveraged the power of computers to double the city’s hit rate in finding stores selling bootleg cigarettes; sped the removal of trees destroyed by Hurricane Sandy; and helped steer overburdened housing inspectors — working with more than 20,000 options — directly to lawbreaking buildings where catastrophic fires were likeliest to occur. 

Forget the Cellphone Fight — We Should Be Allowed to Unlock Everything We Own | Wired Opinion | Wired.com

Copyright laws were originally designed to protect creativity and promote innovation. But now, they are doing exactly the opposite: They’re being used to keep independent shops from fixing new cars. They’re making it almost impossible for farmers to maintain their equipment. And, as we’ve seen in the past few weeks, they’re preventing regular people from unlocking their own cellphones

Twitter Beats The Sell-Side After Cyprus Bailout – Business Insider

Most valuable companies in history, adjusted for inflation | Photo Gallery – Yahoo!

Lee Buchheit, fairy godmother to finance ministers in distress | Business | The Guardian

He does not make a moral judgement in choosing who he acts for, but rather enjoys working for the debtor nations. “It’s just more fun,” he says. “If you represent the lender, your client is tiresomely saying things to you like, ‘Why don’t they just pay us the money back?’ When you’re on the debtor side, you can say, ‘If you want to get it back, why did you give it to us?’”

How Franklin Roosevelt Secretly Ended the Gold Standard

Creating the All-Terrain Human – NYTimes.com

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams.

 

The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good

Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

Italy’s Political Clown Gets Serious – by Tom Mueller  The New Yorker

Had Occupy Wall Street produced a leader with long-term vision and concrete goals, he might have resembled Beppe Grillo…

Smoking, drinking and living alone: what the General Household Survey tells us about how Britain has changed | News | guardian.co.uk

Why analysts should not be investors, Andy Zaky edition

Felix Salmon   Smart and accurate Apple analysts are in high demand, and Zaky, quite sensibly, decided to monetize his gift. In June 2011 he put his blog behind a paywall, charging first $49 per month and then, in June 2012, $200 per month. With 700 subscribers, that meant a six-figure income per month, just by selling access to his detailed Apple analysis and trading recommendations. …… Bullish Cross Asset Management was launched in late 2011, and by November 2012 some 28 investors had invested a total of $10,607,815 with Zaky. And had lost it all. For Zaky, it turns out, was a truly dreadful fund manager:…. But the most astonishing part of the Andy Zaky story is not that he set up a tiny hedge fund which failed. Rather, it’s the lemming-like way in which the subscribers to his newsletter lost a mind-boggling sum of money — quite possibly well over $1 billion….

Canada’s North, Home to Bears, and Once, Camels

Your Fat Has a Brain. Seriously. And It’s Trying to Kill You. | Fitness – Health and Fitness Advice | OutsideOnline.com

Body fat is just an inert layer of blubber, right? If only. New research shows that it’s more like a toxic parasite that doesn’t want to let go. The good news: if you exercise and eat right, you can force it to.