Agalia Tan

“A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many. Defend yourself from

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We’re allowed to be wrong, have conviction and engage in market making. That’s not the problem. The problem is, without reflection or accountability – top-down or bottom-up – hype trains keep running, no one stops to learn, and nothing ever changes.

Hype compounds when many orgs farm their own “evidence.” Plant a trend name, seed it through press connections, then point to the growing mentions of it as proof of accuracy. But this is information laundering – astroturfing. It’s anything but a “prediction.” (No, you were not ahead of the “pickle girl summer aesthetic” trend. You just forced it... See more

prediction markets aggregate a very particular kind of participant – informed, motivated individuals willing to put money behind their expectations. Skin in the game produces a sharper signal than surveys or passive listening. People lie in surveys. They bet cash when they mean it.

NOSOWITZ: So the Golden Age of Hollywood, a lot of the biggest movies from that era are very kind of aspirational, very fancy, very upper crusty. They were stories about people who you kind of dreamed of being.

Starting in the late '60s and early '70s, a whole new wave of directors, like John Cassavetes, Francis Ford Coppola, those kind of guys,... See more

elocution class was where they taught you how to speak properly. So in the prep schools, those elocution classes were based on an attempt to sound worldly. And in the late 19th century, which is when this started, the way to sound worldly and cultured was to sound sort of British. So that's how people were taught to speak, a sort of British way.