Edward Tenner

The accused killer of a security guard in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, James W. von Brunn, followed a trajectory sadly common on the racist and terrorist fringe: good family, education at top schools, promising beginnings in the arts, science, or engineering -- and a puzzling slide into infamy. Think American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell (Brown), the Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski (Harvard, Michigan), the Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta (Cairo…… More »

Fast food restaurants have pointed to the new, healthier items on their menus. And a few years ago, skeptics found the some of the salads contained more calories and fat than burgers in the same establishments.But suppose that they are offering really healthy salads now. What if, in giving people a choice, these dishes really push diners toward the unhealthiest alternatives? That's called "vicarious goal fulfillment," and it's what Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke…… More »

The master furniture maker Sam Maloof, who died last month at the age of 93, is remembered in Janet Eastman's tribute in the Los Angeles Times. The son of Lebanese immigrants and a professional calligrapher, Maloof was a World War Two veteran who quit his first postwar job after the birth of his first child in 1949 because the salary was too low, then persisted 20 years before turning profit as an independent cabinetmarker. His work was coveted by celebrities and…… More »

The Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Kevin O'Brien has stirred strong feelings with his warning that judicial empathy, as invoked by President Obama, is unconstitutional. I have scoured my pocket copy of the Constitution. Couldn't find a single reference to "empathy," though. I tried searching an online version, too, but when I typed "empathy" in the search window, the only answer I got back was, "Did you misspell something?" I looked up the oath of office that…… More »

The Wall Street Journal has an engrossing column by the distinguished writer and translator Susan Bernofsky on the Germanization of Donald Duck. As a graduate student and later as a publishing visitor I had been curious about the Federal Republic's hip cult of The (Original) Donald. Had I been missing some Aesopian subtext? Bernofsky has the answer: the creative magic of censorship. Here's how it happened:In the years following World War II, American influence in…… More »

Michael Osinski, now a Long Island oyster farmer, revisits his past as the programmer who did more than anybody else to enable the Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) that brought down world markets, ultimately splitting income from sales of his $500,000-per-copy program when he worked with a Boston company that had bought it from a former employer. Some cynical quotes from bosses are worthy of Wall Street and Liar's Poker, but my favorite is his observation…… More »

Dan Neil's column on the General Motors bankruptcy in the Los Angeles Times includes two paragraphs on an aspect of GM's troubles that deserves more attention:GM also struggled with its vast and unresponsive, self-perpetuating bureaucracy. When Chairman Roger Smith -- the "Roger" in Michael Moore's skewering "Roger & Me" documentary -- attempted to streamline GM's back-of-the-house operations in the 1980s, the result was chaos.Divisional managers openly…… More »

Where's the outrage, indeed. The Washington Post's Philip Kennicott reflects on the decline of the fine art of museum controversy. Whatever happened to the tradition of exhibition scandals that began with the Metropolitan Museum's allegedly racist "Harlem on My Mind" of 1969, continued through the allegedly obscene Robert Mapplethorpe show of 1989, came home to Washington with the allegedly unpatriotic "Enola Gay" of 1995, and reached a premillenial fervor with the…… More »

CNN Online wonders, with the writer Daniel Wilson, what has happened to the Jetpack and other futurist devices of the 1964 World Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. One answer is that the future not only isn't what it used to be; it never was. Or at least it had already ceased to be so in 1964. The best known review of the aged Robert Moses' discordant swan song remains the headline of the writer Martin Mayer's assessment: "Ho Hum, Come to the Fair." Even the New…… More »

Tom Vanderbilt has illuminating essay on Slate about the declining speed of American railroads as a case study in technological regression. As Vanderbilt observes on the Administration's plans for high speed rail: Obama's bold vision obscures a simple fact: 220 mph would be phenomenal, but we would also do well to simply get trains back up to the speeds they traveled at during the Harding administration. True enough, but at a recent open house of local historical…… More »

A Wall Street Journal piece by Carl Bialik, and his related blog post, examine how the mania for lists amplifies behavior -- and not necessarily for the better. Reporting on a study by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik:[P]opularity in the music world, even unearned, breeds more popularity. Researchers enlisted more than 12,000 volunteers to rate and download songs from among 48 chosen for their relative obscurity. Some of these volunteers were lied to: At…… More »

A press release from the University of Cambridge has announced a forthcoming paper about the latest and possibly greatest stars of non-human animal intelligence, rooks, and their ability to make tools spontaneously without have learned their use from other birds or from humans. The rooks, birds related to ravens and crows, showed themselves the equal of better known animal tool users, the chimpanzees and their distant cousins, the New Caledonian crows..In a series…… More »

Does technological change transform life, or does it mainly repackage age-old questions? Paul Farhi's look at the history of performance-enhancing substances in baseball in the Washington Post is a balanced analysis of a passionately argued issue. (Of course I'm biased; I was a source for another piece he wrote, on the iPod, in 2007. I liked that one, too.)In perhaps the earliest instance of a performance-enhancing substance, ancient Olympians sought a testosterone…… More »

In the Wall Street Journal, my friend Robert Lee Hotz returns to the Twilight Zone of neuroscience, the postmortem anatomy of illustrious gray matter, and its preeminent subject, Albert Einstein:By studying photographs of Einstein's brain taken at his death in 1955, paleoanthropologist Dean Falk at Florida State University identified a dozen subtle variations in its surface that may have heightened his ability to see physics in a new way. Her research suggests how…… More »

With the Memorial Day weekend and the summer holiday season arriving, you might be wondering what's a safer place to drive, the Big Sky roads of Montana or the scary parkways of New Jersey, after reading the ABC News online story on the results of a GMAC Insurance survey, "Top States with America's Worst Drivers." It suggests the wide-open spaces are a safer bet. Idaho, Wisconsin, and Montana drivers were best informed, in that order, and New York, New Jersey, and…… More »

Graduates doubting the wisdom of Daniel Akst's thoughts on self-employment should ponder this column by John Kelly in the Washington Post on the indignities of the psychological test used by one local media company for prospective hires as an alternative to conventional interviews. While test publishers claim that studies bear out the value of their products in better fit and reduced turnover, their critics have a stock of anecdotes to the contrary. There's the…… More »

An analysis of fuel efficiency and automotive safety in USA Today by Jayne O'Donnell and James R. Healey raises big questions about laws and technological progress. Better gas mileage might lead people to drive more, at least partly negating efforts to reduce emissions. Manufacturers required to increase fuel efficiency might also promote smaller cars that some safety officials believe are inherently less safe than larger ones. There were over 1,600 comments on…… More »

Another major US government information technology project is on the rocks, according to the Washington Post. This time the agency is not the FBI but the Copyright Office, where transition to a mainly Web-based registration procedure is producing delays of eighteen months and longer:The library's inspector general has warned that the backlog threatens the integrity of the U.S. copyright system. The irony is that the slowdown stems from a new $52 million…… More »

The Washington Post's Warren Brown has an intriguing history lesson on the customer-relations problems of the American car industry. Haggling was part of American automobile buying from the outset, but according to Brown, the high-pressure tactics of the modern American dealer originated in a single Memphis franchise after World War Two, when new vehicles were scarce and buyers could be browbean into signing a deal that assured fat commissions for salesmen and…… More »

Where have all the bad guys gone? To the electronic frontier, like other ambitious people, of course. Yes, the criminal world has upgraded from 1970s street offenses to high-tech fraud. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, the sociologist Dalton Conley gives a vivid first-person account of the transition to post-industrial criminality. A New York Police Department program sent officers to his family's apartment to mark their possessions to deter burglars --…… More »