Links that deserve to be passed on

I have very little to say about each of these links except that it’s been a glorious week or so of online reading.  I could not bring myself to close these articles from my Firefox tabs without recording them for posterity (as self-centered as I am, it appears I believe widely-circulated articles available on the Internet cease to exist when they leave my screen).

First, from The Atlantic Monthly (yes, I still call it that):

What Makes Us Happy? – By Joshua Wolf Shenk

An excellent, beautiful in that New Yorker-sorta way interrupted (by experiment subject narratives) interview with the man that has been behind the decades-old longitudinal Grant study at Harvard.  It makes me think my Bachelors in Psychology isn’t such a scarlet letter after all.

George Vaillant, head of the study for the past 42 years tries to plumb from the disparate measurements and surveys conducted since 1937 – questions changing to reflect the interests and eras that the study has now outlived – and from the ups, downs, ups and downs again from the cohort of Harvard men the cues to living well and growing up.

The author of the article beautifully ties Vaillant’s near-theology – which often sounds little different than self-help pablum – to Vaillant’s own surprising neuroses and private scandals.  Perhaps in doing so revealing a little known property of Psychologists (and Psychology students) outside of the discipline:  Our interest in mental illness is entirely self-serving.  Physician heal thyself.

And despite the shames of the researcher and the researched, the article lifted my spirits.  The technical feat of the collection, the triumph-against-adversity of the project itself to remain fecund and funded, moreso than even the subjects, is story of a hero.  Even if the hero is a collection of bits and bytes, papers in aged folders, and punch cards stuffed away in some filing cabinet monument in Boston.

Now from Chinese finance and economics magazine, Cai Jing (don’t worry, it’s in English):

Tight Spot for Fed, Blind Spot for Investors – Andy Xie

Mr. Xie provides what seems to me a very thorough and intuitively consistent synopsis of the state of American and international investment, with a US-centricity to his analysis despite the source of the article.

He provides a good anaylsis of the various push and pull forces active in the currency, Treasury, and commodities markets, tying his observations to current action within the equity markets and providing some broad predictions that may give pause to those on the sidelines (like myself) that have been failing to decipher all the noise of the market into something that resembles language.

On Mr. Xie’s implicit recommendation, I think I’ll invest in something loud with two wheels wrapped in Pirelli Diablo Super Corsa SPs.  I think that’s what he’s saying, anyways.

And now for something completely different!

The Ninth Life of a Berkeley Boomer – John Dolan (single page view)

Mr. Dolan always writes wonderfully (though the low-rent site which I enjoy and frequent doesn’t seem to stress spellchecks) and has some especially fascinating insights into the life of the near-literati; the failed writers who became failed academics who became just plain poor.

Here he captures the story of a friend much like himself: talented, but lacking the good sense to slow his pace to stay within the proximal zone of his ‘betters’ that would ultimately judge him and decide his fate.

In its telling, he reveals the life of some of the members of the true American elite: The filthy rich and the chieftains of academia who rule their roosts.  And even to them, a smart person cannot escape subjugation by them.  And a crazy person doesn’t escape their useful purposes.

He describes a secret bit of life that I probably always lacked the talent to access, or at least the high school extracurriculars.  And my entrance essays truly sucked.

… and the cow goes moo