Round up the usual links
Holidays allow for a certain amount of catchup reading. Here's some of what I enjoyed:
Gary Wolf's piece on the Dean campaign's use of decentralized, Internet-style organization didn't tell me anything I hadn't gleaned already from decentralized reading -- but it put all the pieces together beautifully, and should be required reading for those inside-the-Beltway pundits who still don't understand what's happening in their world.
If you want to understand what's happening to the U.S. economy -- for instance, why inflation is so low, and why jobs are so scarce -- Charles Fishman's piece on Wal-Mart in Fast Company is eye-opening. Since Wal-Mart is notoriously close-lipped, and so are the people who work with it, in order to put the story together, Fishman had to use the old reporting trick of finding sources among former employees of Wal-Mart partners. (Since the article's point is that Wal-Mart's demand for low prices sometimes drives its own suppliers out of business, there were more of these than might normally be typical.) The piece ends up portraying a company -- "Wal-Mart in the role of Adam Smith's invisible hand" -- whose brutal efficiency at driving its suppliers' prices down has served as an accelerator to globalization, a boon to consumers' pocketbooks and a giant engine of economic dislocation for American workers. Classical economists would see nothing but good in the result. But the turbocharged displacement of livelihoods and corporate stability gives one pause.
For fun at the intersection of geek culture and high culture, there's Alex Ross's New Yorker piece on the subterranean kinship between "The Lord of the Rings" and Wagner's "Ring" cycle. I don't agree with everything Ross says but it's a smart piece for those of us who are fans of both masterworks.
Finally, here's a BBC story by a psychologist who claims that good luck isn't a matter of luck at all. "My research eventually revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good." [Link courtesy Metafilter]
Happy New Year!
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