Fascinating thesis, but it's unclear to me how he manages to get through the piece without even namechecking Foucault.

Again via Gen. And again, this rings so, so true to me.

Via EthanZ: John Sexton's untimely, probably doomed plan to transplant an NYU seedling to (wait for it) Abu Dhabi.

Per my conversation with Jack Qiu in Brisbane.

While I take no satisfaction in saying so, this article only reiterates everything I've been saying about Dubai for the last five years. Also: "Suddenly our cards stopped working. We had nothing. We were thrown out of our apartment."

BBC data visualization pr0n inna Stamen stylee.

[this is good]

You will not do better than this, on the cretinous Friedman. I have long been in awe of the infallible wrongness of his tin ear, which Taibbi tags early on and justly.

At first pass, the Ethopian plan sounds reasonable. It's little different from "D.O.C." or "appellation controllée," right?

How many different "Web2.0" tropes can the Times pack into one piece? The wisdom of crowds, the power of data visualization, open source collaboration, it's all in here...

LOL! Tom "The Mustache and the Olive Tree" Friedman finally gets his due. Starts right in and does not let up. Oh, also: "our language really matters, and metaphors need to be chosen carefully."