Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. The most interesting one I read this week was a long one, and deserves your full attention:

Why the Best War Reporter in a Generation Had to Suddenly Stop—via Esquire: A profile on C.J. Chivers, a war correspondent who’s seen it all in the past fifteen years, from Ground Zero on 9/11 to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya:

By that April 2011, when Libya was collapsing into civil war, Chivers himself had been at war for ten years. He’d been in Afghanistan in November 2001, just after the bombing began, as he’d been in Iraq in March 2003, when the bombing began there—as he’d also been in lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, and as he had been in every theater since, too many deployments for him to even remember, amounting to years away from his home, his wife, and his five small children, four boys and a girl.

The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What theTimes could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other things, its study of the weapons we use to kill one another. After reporting on a firefight—whether he was in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Ossetia, Libya, or Syria—he’d look for shell casings and ordnance fragments. If he was embedded with American soldiers or Marines, he’d ask them if he could look through what they had found for an hour or so—”finger fucking,” he’d call it—and ask his photographer to take pictures of ammunition stamps and serial numbers. Over time and in this way he would reveal a vast world of small-arms trade and secret trafficking that no other journalist had known existed before.

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the three I found most interesting:

Why Singapore has the smartest kids in the world, via cnn.com—I’ve heard many vague statements bemoaning how bad the American education system is, but this quote clearly distills what’s lacking:

“One thing that’s been clear to them is that the world economy no longer rewards people just for what they know. Google knows everything. The world economy rewards people for what they can do with what they know.”

How Did Picasso Create 50,000 Works of Art? via Altucher Confidential—There’s a lot of wisdom in James Altucher’s writing. He’s prolific and repeats himself a lot but I found some enlightening new ideas in these reflections on quotes from Picasso:

“Action is the foundational key to all success.”

I know too many people who have an idea for a book, or a show, or a business. But “when I have time” or “it’s too late for me”, ignoring that Barbara Cortland wrote 23 books in her 82nd year.

The one thing in common from anyone above is that they wrote every single day. It’s hard to sit down every day and…sit. Blank paper. Blank canvas. Blankness.

And then…if you do something…it might suck. It might be the worst thing you ever do.

Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time, has an incredible world record: he’s missed more shots in professional basketball than any other player. He’s missed over 13,000 shots.

So taking action is more important than anything else.

Nothing => Thinking => Doing => Finishing => Repeat is a daily practice for…I don’t know.

But I hope I can do it every day.

Is The World Looking Progressively Weirder? via Marginal Revolution—As the glut of information being generated expands on top of what is already available, our attention spans can’t hope to keep up:

As the world is more connected, with the global dominating over the local, the number of sources of news is multiplying. But your consciousness remains limited. So we are experiencing a winner-take-all effect in information: like a large movie theatre with a small door. 

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the two I found most interesting:

Throughout the week, I read a LOT of online articles. What follows are the two I found most interesting:

Miracle Healers, via The Economist—A disturbing look at the profitable and unregulated market for nutritional supplements:

Strangely, it was regulations which gave the industry its biggest lift. In the 1990s the FDA considered new rules for supplements’ health claims. “It set off a firestorm,” remembers David Kessler, the FDA’s commissioner at the time. “The industry understood there were billions of dollars at stake.” Lobbyists framed the issue as one of personal liberty. Bureaucrats would rob Americans of both vitamins and the freedom to care for themselves.

The result was a law that covered not just vitamins and minerals, but botanicals, amino acids, enzymes, metabolites and pills made from animal organs. The 1994 law let firms sell supplements without requiring the FDA’s approval for safety or efficacy. It also, for the first time, authorised firms to tout health benefits. They cannot claim that their pills can diagnose, prevent, treat or cure a disease, but they may make vague claims that it “supports a healthy heart” or is “essential for strong bones”, and so on. As a result, rather than restrain the firms, the law unleashed them. There are more than 20 times as many supplements on the market as there were in 1994.

Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful—via The New York Times, Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra gets murky when they’re so politically powerful that they get to write the laws. This op-ed is so spot on I might as well get you started with the first three paragraphs:

CONSERVATIVES and liberals interminably debate the merits of “the free market” versus “the government.” Which one you trust more delineates the main ideological divide in America.

In reality, they aren’t two separate things. There can’t be a market without government. Legislators, agency heads and judges decide the rules of the game. And, over time, they change the rules. The important question, too rarely discussed, is who has the most influence over these decisions and in that way wins the game.

Two centuries ago slaves were among the nation’s most valuable assets, and after the Civil War, perhaps land was. Then factories, machines, railroads and oil transformed America. By the 1920s most working Americans were employees, and the most contested property issue was their freedom to organize into unions.

Now information and ideas are the most valuable forms of property. Most of the cost of producing it goes into discovering it or making the first copy. After that, the additional production cost is often zero. Such “intellectual property” is the key building block of the new economy. Without government decisions over what it is, and who can own it and on what terms, the new economy could not exist.