SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING

  The Pomona College class of 2025, photo-captured on the steps of Carnegie Hall on August 28th, 2021, image promptly shared on official Pomona social media accounts.  ASSESSING risk is hard, and we can reasonably hope that setting up and photo-capturing the moment above did not result in any transmission of the COVID virus.  Precautions were in fact taken: the students were assembled while wearing masks and were told to remove them just for the photo—and then to re-mask afterward.  And admirably, Pomona requires that students be vaccinated.  Put simply then: the amount of heightened COVID risk for the sake of capturing this photo, while greater than zero, was probably moderate, not extreme.   Yet this relatively happy assessment almost certainly misses this mark on the low side, since the consequences of taking and circulating the photo are not limited to the event itself, meaning to the staging and taking of the photo.  We must also conside...

It is worth listening to what commentators are saying about Steve Jobs today, upon his death, for the sake of thinking about "Steve Jobs," the mythology. According to Matt Bai, "Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making..."  Really, Matt Bai?  Are Americans really breaking away from large institutions and centralized decision-making?  The last time I looked, for example, the U.S. military was an institution that has remained frighteningly large.  So too, the decisions to torture people (by the Bush-Cheney administration) and the decisions to use high tech drones to kill people (by the Obama administration)--I think those are very much cases of "centralized decision-making."  What am I missing?  And to give one more example: when oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months in 2010, BP (formerly Brit...