Fate of Plays Is Decided by Seven Middle-Aged Critics “Who Hated Mickey Mouse When They Were Kids”

(p. B1) Some playgoers don’t care for theatrical inside baseball, but if, like me, you love to peer through a peephole at the craziness of show folk, you’ll find “Light Up the Sky” hard to resist.
. . .
I especially like this sideswipe at drama critics: “What do I need with the theater–a cockamamie business where you get one roll of the dice from seven middle-aged men on the aisle who hated Mickey Mouse when they were kids.”

For the full review, see:
TERRY TEACHOUT. “‘Why So Serious?” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): D7.
(Note: the date of the online version of the review is May 27, 2015, and has the title “‘Light Up the Sky’ Review: Why So Serious?”)

Intel Entrepreneur Gordon Moore Was “Introverted”

(p. A11) “In the world of the silicon microchip,” [Thackray, Brock and Jones] write, “Moore was a master strategist and risk taker. Even so, he was not especially a self-starter.” Mr. Moore possesses many of the stereotypical character traits of an introverted Ph.D. chemist: working for hours on his own, avoiding small talk and favoring laconic statements. Indeed, as a manager he often avoided conflict, even when a colleague’s errors persisted in plain sight.
. . .
After two leadership changes at Fairchild in 1967 and 1968, which unsettled its talented employees, Mr. Moore departed to help found a new firm, Intel, with a fellow Fairchild engineer, the charming and brilliant Robert Noyce (another of the “traitorous eight”). They also brought along a younger colleague, the confrontational and hyper-energetic Andy Grove. Each one of the famous triumvirate would serve as CEO at some point over the next three decades.

For the full review, see:
SHANE GREENSTEIN. “BOOKSHELF; Silicon Valley’s Lawmaker; What became Moore’s law first emerged in a 1965 article modestly titled ‘Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits’.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 26, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed names, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 25, 2015.)

The book under review is:
Thackray, Arnold, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones. Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary. New York: Basic Books, 2015.

Banks Used “Regulatory Arbitrage” to Rent Seek at Taxpayers’ Expense

(p. 21) Between 2009 and 2011, a group of economists at New York University’s Stern School of Business published an influential series of reports and books that sought to explain what, exactly, happened during the financial crisis. The depth of the inquiry was notable because the school is generally thought of as a Wall Street-friendly training ground for future bankers. One of the most striking findings was that between 1980 and 2000, the large banks in America had significantly moved away from productivity ­enhancement and toward rent-­seeking.
For the reports’ principal authors, Matthew Richardson and Viral Acharya, the evidence of this shift came from careful study of the various ways that banks have legally evaded regulation of their capital requirements. A fundamental tenet of bank regulation is that banks shouldn’t borrow too much, because being overleveraged makes them vulnerable to collapse. But banks can most easily make huge profits if they borrow huge amounts, and they tend to pursue unsafe levels of borrowing. Then, the authors observed, they use their power as essential tools in an economy to negotiate bailouts from the government, forcing taxpayers to guarantee their losses. Richardson and Acharya showed that it was precisely because our banking regulations were so extensive and complex that banks were able to seek rents. They called this “regulatory arbitrage,” a term that means banks have harnessed regulation and turned it into a powerful business tool.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM DAVIDSON. “Wall Street Is Using the Power of Dodd-Frank Against Itself.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., May 31, 2015): 18 & 20-21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is MAY 27, 2015, and has the title “Wall Street Is Using the Power of Dodd-Frank Against Itself.”)

One of the relevant papers by Acharya and Richardson is:
Acharya, Viral V., and Matthew Richardson. “Causes of the Financial Crisis.” Critical Review 21, no. 2-3 (2009): 195-210.

Seeking Free Speech in China

(p. B1) A few years ago, the Chinese writer Murong Xuecun had the kind of career most novelists dream about. His eight books had sold two million copies in China, and he had amassed more than eight million social media followers.
But in 2011, he decided to stop publishing. He was afraid of running afoul of Chinese censors, and was even more concerned about the self-censorship that had crept into his work. Now he wishes he had never published some of his earlier books, which tiptoed around political issues.
“When I look back on them, I feel ashamed of myself,” said Mr. Murong, 41, who lives in Beijing and whose real name is Hao Qun.
Mr. Murong was among a handful of writers who gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library on Wednesday night to protest the limits on free speech and expression in China. The gathering, organized by the PEN American Center, was prompted by the presence of a large delegation of Chinese publishers at BookExpo America, a major publishing trade event taking place in Manhattan this week.

For the full story, see:
ALEXANDRA ALTER. “A Mixed Message From China.” The New York Times (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): B1 & B6.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 28, 2015, and has the title “China’s Publishers Court America as Its Authors Scorn Censorship.”)

Canny Outlaws in Education and at Hogwarts

(p. 174) Interestingly, the union members in some of the schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school group with a solid educational track record, did not boycott the benchmark tests. The reason that they refused is revealing. Green Dot’s exams are created by a panel of teachers from its schools and are regularly reviewed for effectiveness and modified by the teachers. The tests have more credibility with the teachers than the tests for the rest of the district’s schools, which are written by an outside company, imposed from above, and don’t mesh with year-round schedules.
The quiet resistance of canny outlaws and the vocal protests of others are signs that teachers dedicated to preserving and encouraging discretion and wise judgment are not going quietly into the night. These teachers are not people who simply rebel at rules or who are just committed to their own ways of doing things. They are committed to the aims of teaching, a practice whose purpose is to educate students to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, reasonable, reflective, and humane. And they are brave enough to act on these commitments, taking the risks necessary to find ways around the rules. We suspect that many of our readers are canny outlaws themselves or know people who are: practitioners who have the know-how and courage to bend or sidestep for-(p. 175)mulaic procedures or rigid scripts or bureaucratic requirements in order to accomplish the aims of their practice. We admire canny outlaws in the stories we tell ourselves about such people and even in some of our children’s stories. We read the Harry Potter tales to them because Harry, Ron, and Hermione are canny outlaws who gain the guts and skill to break school rules and stand up to illegitimate power in order to do the right thing to achieve the aims of wizardry, indeed to save the practice itself.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.

Insights More Likely When Mood Is Positive and Distractions Few

If insights are more likely in the absence of distractions, then why are business executives so universally gung-ho on imposing on their workers the open office space layouts that are guaranteed to maximize distractions?

(p. C7) We can’t put a mathematician inside an fMRI machine and demand that she have a breakthrough over the course of 20 minutes or even an hour. These kinds of breakthroughs are too mercurial and rare to be subjected to experimentation.

We are, however, able to study the phenomenon more generally. Enter John Kounios and Mark Beeman, two cognitive neuroscientists and the authors of the “The Eureka Factor.” Messrs. Kounios and Beeman focus their book on the science behind insights and how to cultivate them.
As Mr. Irvine recognizes, studying insights in the lab is difficult. But it’s not impossible. Scientists have devised experiments that can provoke in subjects these kinds of insights, ones that feel genuine but occur on a much smaller scale.
. . .
The book includes some practical takeaways of how to improve our odds of getting insights as well. Blocking out distractions can create an environment conducive to insights. So can having a positive mood. While many of the suggestions contain caveats, as befits the delicate nature of creativity, ultimately it seems that there are ways to be more open to these moments of insight.

For the full review, see:
SAMUEL ARBESMAN. “Every Man an Archimedes; Insights can seem to appear spontaneously, but fully formed. No wonder the ancients spoke of muses.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 23, 2015): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 22, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Kounios, John, and Mark Beeman. The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. New York: Random House, 2015.

Physicists Accepting Theories Based on Elegance Rather than Evidence

(p. 5) Do physicists need empirical evidence to confirm their theories?
. . .
A few months ago in the journal Nature, two leading researchers, George Ellis and Joseph Silk, published a controversial piece called “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” They criticized a newfound willingness among some scientists to explicitly set aside the need for experimental confirmation of today’s most ambitious cosmic theories — so long as those theories are “sufficiently elegant and explanatory.” Despite working at the cutting edge of knowledge, such scientists are, for Professors Ellis and Silk, “breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical.”
Whether or not you agree with them, the professors have identified a mounting concern in fundamental physics: Today, our most ambitious science can seem at odds with the empirical methodology that has historically given the field its credibility.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM FRANK and MARCELO GLEISER. “Gray Matter; A Crisis at the Edge of Physics.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., JUNE 7, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is JUNE 5, 2015, and has the title “A Crisis at the Edge of Physics.”)

The controversial Nature article, mentioned above, is:
Ellis, George, and Joe Silk. “Scientific Method: Defend the Integrity of Physics.” Nature 516, no. 7531 (Dec. 18, 2014): 321-23.

Not Clear If Net Neutrality Is Good for Consumers

(p. B2) Of course, government antitrust and communications policy is supposed to benefit consumers, not any individual company or group of companies. “It’s fair to say Netflix has gotten something of a free pass,” said Scott Hemphill, visiting professor of antitrust and intellectual property at New York University School of Law. “This open Internet principle that’s in ascendance is certainly good for Netflix. It’s harder to say it’s good for consumers.”
. . .
Despite Netflix’s arguments that it shouldn’t have to pay fees to a broadband provider, that proposition is hardly self-evident. The fees Netflix so fiercely opposes are analogous to those found in many industries, such as credit cards, where both consumers and merchants pay the credit card companies. “It’s hard to say if these fees are good or bad for consumers,” Professor Hemphill said.

For the full story, see:
JAMES B. STEWART. “Common Sense; Netflix’s Invisible Hand In Policy and Mergers.” The New York Times (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): B2-B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 28, 2015, and has the title “Her Majesty’s Jihadists” which was also the title used on the cover, but not at the start of the actual article on p. 42, which has the title “Common Sense; How Netflix Keeps Finding Itself on the Same Side as Regulators.”)

Too Many Rules Results in “Adherence Instead of Audacity”

(p. 159) . . . Wong found a distinct downside to this division of labor. “Put all the directed requirements together and the life of a company commander is spent executing somebody else’s good ideas.” Too many rules and requirements “removes all discretion” and stifles the development of flexible officers, resulting in “reactive instead of proactive thought, compliance instead of creativity, and adherence instead of audacity.” These are not the kinds of officers the army needs in unpredictable and quickly changing situations where specific orders are absent and military protocol is unclear. The army is creating cooks, says Wong, leaders who are “quite adept at carrying out a recipe,” rather than chefs who can “look at the ingredients available to them and create a meal.” Wong found a number of top brass who agreed. Retired General Wesley Clark observed that senior army leaders have “gone too far in over-planning, over-prescribing, and over-controlling.” The consequence, according to retired General Frederick Kroesen, is that “initiative is stymied, and decision making is replaced by waiting to be told…. There is no more effective way to destroy the leadership potential of young officers and noncommissioned officers than to deny them opportunities to make decisions appropriate for their assignments.”
The same thing can be said about public school teachers.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.
(Note: first ellipsis added; second in original.)

Competition between Greek City-States “Led to Specialization and Innovation”

(p. C8) Mr. Ober’s approach is theoretical, not narrative-driven. When he does discuss the specifics of classical history, in the second half of the book, he does so largely to support the theses he has developed in the first half about the key causes of Greece’s rise.
These causes, in Mr. Ober’s view, derived from the competitive world of small, self-governing city-states that emerged in Greece starting around 800 B.C. Competition between states led to specialization and innovation, as exemplified by the high-grade ceramics industry at Athens, and to a spirit of “rational cooperation” among the members of each polity (think of those ants). Within each state, self-governance created what Mr. Ober terms “rule egalitarianism”: a sense of fairness and security that “encouraged investment in human capital and lowered transaction costs.” The result was a rise not only in standards of living but also in civic pride, technological progress and refinement of artisanship.
. . .
It’s no accident that Mr. Ober’s terminology overlaps with the language of modern economics–“creative destruction” is a phrase he uses frequently. He wants to encourage comparisons between ancient Greece and the modern West. They offer two examples of “political and economic exceptionalism,” featuring both pluralistic government and the rapid growth of wealth.

For the full review, see:
James Romm. “Greeks and Their Gifts; Competition among self-governing city-states led to specialization, innovation and cooperation.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 23, 2015): C8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 22, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Ober, Josiah. The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.