The Return of Anonymity

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” First published in 1993, it’s probably among the top ten most famous New Yorker cartoons.  It reveals a society just becoming aware of this new phenomenon, the Internet – and already struggling with the freedom it was granting users to obscure and misrepresent their identities.  In the [...]

Change

Two things happened yesterday that reminded me that for all of our complaining about how schools never change, teachers never change, things only get worse, kids only get worse, the whole world is going down the tubes — some things do get better and we do move forward sometimes: 1.  America elected its first African-American [...]

Thinking About Uncertainty

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a somewhat heady but also very funny and insightful treatise on the importance of randomness in our lives – and our complete blindness to it.  He argues that we now live in “extremistan” – a world [...]