THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing.

Yes, a pony. See a link for the picture.

Over the past two weeks, I wandered Toronto’s downtown core with five prepaid Visa and MasterCard gift cards, in $50 and $75 denominations, waiting for people to ask for money.

Sad, but interesting story.

And I think that matters, and I think it’s worth saying again: We put a lot of pressure on men to build empires and to get rich doing it. And men process this deeply, and it can be as insidious as a young woman’s obsession with being thin. And we don’t talk about it. We don’t actively discourage men from feeling this way.

Why? I’ll offer that this imbalance comes from a one-sided "feminist" culture that emphasizes all the ways in which women are victims while neatly overlooking the emotional struggles of the modern man. “You poor things,” we tell women, “the world is a mean place, and you’re something that can be easily hurt.”

We would never say that to our men. We would never project an inherent weakness onto men the way we do when we write about how the pressure to be beautiful hurts women.

Great article that gives a healthy perspective on self-imposed struggles of many men.

Consciously or subconsciously, women do seem to take their future prospects into account when deciding when to start having children. At a meeting last year, Sarah Johns at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK, reported that in her study of young women from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds in Gloucestershire, UK, those who perceived their environment as risky or dangerous, and those that thought they might die at a relatively young age, were more likely to become mothers while they were in their teens. "If your dad died of a heart attack at 45, your 40-year-old mum has got chronic diabetes and you've had one boyfriend who has been stabbed, you know you've got to get on with it," she says.

Why early pregnancy in poor areas is an adaptation strategy and why current efforts to fight it are largely misguided.

To me what this means is that we can slowly move the culture in the direction of valuing smarts and even nerdiness. Bill Gates has done this, to some degree – we now celebrate the alpha nerd.

Rebuttal to classic Paul Graham's article. Though not as half entertaining as the original.

Throughout the campaign two questions seemed to linger in people’s minds: “Are you gay?” and “What’s driving you to do this?”.

What happens if straight man petitions for gays' rights? He's called gay.

I am sick of building our common identity around funeral marches and failed uprisings. I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.

Olga Tokarczuk on the way Poles handled president's plane crash.

As it turns out, to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific meeting is to court controversy (after all, “Who decides what is a successful life?”) At the conclusion of my talk, I fell into debate with another invited speaker, who seemed, at first glance, to be very well positioned to reason effectively about the implications of science for our understanding of morality. She holds a degree in genetics from Dartmouth, a masters in biology from Harvard, and a law degree, another masters, and a Ph.D. in the philosophy of biology from Duke. This scholar is now a recognized authority on the intersection between criminal law, genetics, neuroscience and philosophy. Here is a snippet of our conversation, more or less verbatim: 

She: What makes you think that science will ever be able to say that forcing women to wear burqas is wrong?

Me: Because I think that right and wrong are a matter of increasing or decreasing wellbeing—and it is obvious that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags, and beating or killing them if they refuse, is not a good strategy for maximizing human wellbeing.

She: But that’s only your opinion.

Me: Okay… Let’s make it even simpler. What if we found a culture that ritually blinded every third child by literally plucking out his or her eyes at birth, would you then agree that we had found a culture that was needlessly diminishing human wellbeing?

She: It would depend on why they were doing it.

Me (slowly returning my eyebrows from the back of my head): Let’s say they were doing it on the basis of religious superstition. In their scripture, God says, “Every third must walk in darkness.”

She: Then you could never say that they were wrong.

Sam Harris provides further explanation to his TED talk.

I don't believe he'll be too successful, at least not in this generation. What he proposes is basically an attack at religion. Though he didn't state this explicitly, religious people will feel uneasy about the proposal of entrusting morality to secular experts driven by the goal of maximizing “well-being”. Not that secular experts any worse than religious leaders, but the former certainly lack the support of “tradition”. It took several centuries to acknowledge superiority of empirical evidence over tradition in science, so I don't think it will happen overnight in morality.

Also, why oh why, the first comment to an insightful, 5000 words article on ethics has to be like this?

Men don't write black women back. Or rather, they write them back far less often than they should. Black women reply the most, yet get by far the fewest replies. Essentially every race--including other blacks--singles them out for the cold shoulder.

Interesting commentary on racism in dating.

America’s meritocratic elites, Lasch claims, “are at home only in transit, en route to a high-level conference, to the grand opening of a new franchise, to an international film festival, or to an undiscovered resort. Theirs is essentially a tourist’s view of the world-not a perspective likely to encourage a passionate devotion to democracy.

Insightful and thought-provoking case against meritocracy. Of course it's wrong, but that doesn't make it any less interesting.