Shai Oster et al | Bloomberg | 26 December 2012 How children of China's Communist old guard got so rich. They were put in charge of state corporations created in 1980s. Used assets and cashflow to build private real estate empires in 1990s. Now their kids crash Ferraris Comments Felix Salmon | Reuters | 26 December 2012 "Philanthropy is one of those areas where the richer you are, the more likely you are to be doing it spectacularly wrong." So let's run down the list of the ways super-rich donors aren't as helpful as they think they are Comments Michael Kranish | Boston | 22 December 2012 Republican strategists miscalculated badly. Romney's problems were deeper than was understood. Now those strategists are reverse-engineering the election campaign to work out exactly where and how it went wrong (h/t Daniel Lippman) Comments Jonah Weiner | NYT | 20 December 2012 It helps that Seinfeld is such a likeable character, and that good humour is his stock-in-trade. But wow, this profile is a pleasure to read. "In his jokes he arranges life's messy confusions into a bouquet of trivial irritants" Comments Michael Skapinker | FT | 21 December 2012 On the history and plentiful peculiarities of English orthography. "Why is English spelling such a tangle? It started when Latin-speaking missionaries arrived in Britain in the 6th century without enough letters in their alphabet" Comments Andrew Hacker | NYRB | 21 December 2012 On big data, probability, Wall Street, Nate Silver, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Life gets less predictable, even as our analytical methods improve, because the complexity of our society grows faster than our analytics do Comments Corey Robin | Jacobin | 27 December 2012 We live in a world, not of Hobbesian states, but of failed Hobbesian states. We accept a tradeoff between freedom and security. But our governments are selective about whose freedom they repress, and whose security they assure. Comments Ron Rosenbaum | Smithsonian | 24 December 2012 Silicon Valley visionary, pioneer of virtual reality, recants his faith in Web 2.0: "You can draw an analogy to what happened with communism, where at some point you just have to say there's too much wrong with these experiments" Comments | 
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