I’m debuting the “good read” tag today, for long articles of general interest that I think you’d enjoy. There are a couple of sites who are great for this sort of thing — Long Reads and The Browser. The best long articles that are published every day seem to pop up everywhere, including both of those blogs and on Twitter, so I usually don’t bother to link to them, but I’m going to start, simply as an endorsement, if nothing else.
On a related note, if you’re not using Instapaper, you should be. It’s the tool that enabled me to switch from playing Angry Birds to reading excellent writing as my time waster of choice when I’m in line or waiting for an appointment.
Today’s read is an article in the New York Times about physicist Geoffrey West, who develops quantitative laws that describe the behavior cities and corporations. His discovery is that cities amplify productivity as they grow, whereas corporations diminish it.
In this series, I’m going to try to avoid selectively quoting as well, because the whole point is that you should read the articles.
Climate Change 101
Here’s a must read, or at least must forward, article on climate change from the New York Times: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning. Basically it’s a long review of what we know about climate change, how long we’ve known it, and what we can do about it at this point. It also covers the way that climate change deniers work to undermine things that are generally accepted basic scientific facts. The thing that really stood out to me is that the basic mechanism of climate change and the expected results have been well known since the 1960s. Deniers like to say that in the 70’s alarmists worried about global cooling, but the truth is that climate scientists have understood climate change perfectly well.