“David Brooks And Jeremy Paxman To Judge The Golden Giraffes”

I don’t think I have much of a chance here, not because of the judging—I’d trust Brooks and Paxman to recognize good writing—but because the competition includes some heavy hitters, including Dan Davies with a meta-blog-post called The Verjus Manifesto, Sara Paretsky on The Detective As Speech, and Charles Pierce with . . . well, it almost doesn’t matter what, since anything by Charles Pierce is gonna be good. Hey—isn’t it cheating to include a professional writer on this list? It would be like Robin Williams coming on to the Gong Show to win a quick $516.32.

Other notable items on the list include Peter McCleery’s gimmicky-but-well-executed Thank You For Calling Mamet’s Appliance Centre and Evan Ratliff’s grabbily-titled-but-disappointing My Wife Found My Email In The Ashley Madison Database. (Spoiler: it was someone else who used his email address.)

Also a post by blog favorite Scott Adams. Not about Charlie Sheen, though.

Unfortunately it’s hard to quickly get a sense of all hundred articles cos you have to click through to 10 separate pages.

My own article on the list is a post from January on Psychology And Behavioural Economics, which begins stirringly:

I’ve been coming across these issues from several different directions lately, and I wanted to get the basic idea down without killing myself in the writing of it. So consider this a sketchy first draft.

Charles Pierce, it ain’t. Seriously, though, I appreciate being appreciated, and I appreciate that they’ll consider something that’s exploratory and bloggy, that’s not so polished. I like The Browser; they published two 5books interviews with me and one with my sister.

Top 10 vote getters get to be judged by David Brooks! You can vote here.

16 thoughts on ““David Brooks And Jeremy Paxman To Judge The Golden Giraffes”

  1. I wish they would have linked the articles at the voting page. I remember reading most of the articles that are nominated from blogs I follow, but there are quite a few in there that seem really interesting.

  2. Totally unrelated but could not resist:

    From an observational study that I presume freely mined the usual data sets:

    – “Association of Coffee Consumption with Total and Cause-specific Mortality in Three Large Prospective Cohorts,” Ming Ding, Ambika Satija, Shilpa N. Bhupathiraju, Yang Hu, Qi Sun, Walter Willett, Rob M. van Dam, Frank B. Hu, Circulation, online November 16, 2015. http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/moderate-coffee-drinking-may-lower-risk-of-premature-death/

    To

    – “Yippee! It’s Official: Coffee Will Make You Live Longer” http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/health/551066/coffee-is-good-for-you-health-benefits.html

    Another Day, Another Scientific Discovery!

    PS
    How many people here would say 3-5 coffees a day is “moderate consumption”?

    • I reflexively rolled my eyes when I heard this mentioned on NPR this morning. Looking into it more now, I see they had a longer discussion including an interview of one of the authors this evening (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/11/16/456191657/drink-to-your-health-study-links-daily-coffee-habit-to-longevity). Much of it actually has appropriate cautions in interpretations, but the very end goes:

      [interviewer] “As you point out, the participants in these studies are about 95 percent white, largely middle-class and well-educated. Can you extrapolate to other populations?”

      [interviewee] “Yes, I’m quite sure these findings would apply to other populations. This is a biological relationship. And we basically have a common biology.”

      Uh … Where’s the evidence?

    • > How many people here would say 3-5 coffees a day is “moderate consumption”?

      I peaked at 10+ cups a day sophomore year of college. Was taking too many classes. I needed it to stay awake. The first three cups were pleasurable. The tenth one?… No so much. By the end of the semester I was falling asleep at my desk twitching. That and my rapidly-dissolving stomach lining convinced me to lighten up on the credits thereafter. (I have three cups a day now.)

  3. They should have given the opportunity to vote for more than 1 entry. Selecting only 1 out of 100 nominations doesn’t make sense. Also, what Hasdrubal said. I am capable of posting into Google any entry I want, but that’s not how it should be done.

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