Making My Own Sunday Instapaper

I’ve been hooked on Marco Arment’s Instapaper since it first shipped. It’s a simple iPhone application that has transformed what I read on a regular basis. I used to read books (sometimes weighty tomes) and then short things online. I rarely read longer form articles because I didn’t have time to get to them during the day. Now, I can queue them up on Instapaper and have them in my pocket whenever I have a down moment. It’s to the point that I’m not that interested in reading the Sunday Times or The New Yorker. I quickly browse and add things that look interesting.

Here’s what I’ve brought to Cafe Pedlar this morning:

Reagan Did It - NY Times
by Paul Krugman

Eternal Vigiliance - New Statesman
Throughout the 1940s, George Orwell was formulating the ideas about language and politics that found their ultimate expression in Nineteen Eighty-Four. His essays from this period are a plain-spoken pleasure, despite their contradictions

Show or Tell - Critic at Large: New Yorker
Louis Menand on whether creative writing should be taught.

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live - Time
Steven Berlin Johnson

The Quiet Coup - the Atlantic
Simon Johnson - The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

Why Adwords Won’t Work for Social Networks
Matt Maroon

Is Design the Preeminent Protagonist in User Experience?
Phillip Tobias, Daniel Spiegel

Annals of Medicine: The Cost Conundrum - New Yorker
Atwul Gawande, What a Texas town can teach us about healthcare

The Golden Football
Groupon is a new collective economic model

The Dark Side of Dubai - The Independent
Johann Hari

The Battle Between Art & Algorithm
Well, these shifts are triggering a smoothing out in our experiences, prompting a reduction in serendipity and introducing a spooky predictability to many facets of our lives. It’s becoming clear that ultra relevance comes with a hidden price. Because if everything’s relevant, then nothing’s unexpected, and if nothing’s unexpected, then nothing surprises you, and if nothing surprises you, then that’s a strange, neutralized, vanilla kind of life to lead.

Nicholas Lemann at Columbia Journalism School

Teach a Kid to Argue - Figures of Speech

Is Pornography the New Tobacco? - Hoover Institute

Crazy Compensation and Crisis - WSJ
Alan Blinder

The Bilderberg Plan for 2009: Remaking the Global Political Economy
Oligarchical conspiracy

1984: The Masterpiece that Killed George Orwell

The Harlem Project - NY Times
Geoffrey Canada, making magic in education

The Temptation of St. Warren [Buffet]
Michael Lewis, New Republic 1992

Getting Past the Pie Chart - SEED

Surfing the Universe - New Yorker
An academic dropout and the search for a Theory of Everything

How People See Themselves - Edge
Hubert Burda

Where Hip-hop Lives - New Yorker
Ben McGrath, Hot 97’s turf wars