Matt Taibbi:

Start with the most recent news: last week, Sanders announced plans to introduce an interesting new bill, one that’s a direct response to comments made recently by the likes of Eric Holder about the difficulty in prosecuting big banks. Holder said some institutions have grown so large that prosecuting its executives may have a “negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

This was an extraordinary statement to come out of the mouth of the Attorney General – essentially announcing in advance a disinclination to prosecute a whole class of people. It’s Minority Report in reverse – pre-noncrime. What was even more bizarre was that this wasn’t an inadvertent comment or a slip of the tongue, it was absolutely consistent with comments made by other DOJ officials late last year after the slap-on-the-wrist HSBC (money-laundering) and UBS (rate-fixing) settlements. Worse, after Holder and other prosecutorial pushovers like Lanny Breuer made these comments, there was utter silence from the White House, making it crystal clear that this is a coordinated policy.

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

The era where the PC is dominant in IT is rapidly coming to a close as we move towards a future dominated by post-PC devices such as smartphones and tablets, and if your business is reliant on the PC to keep the dollars flowing in then you’d better start working on “Plan B.”

The message that the era of the PC is coming to a close comes from a company at the heart of the industry – Dell.

In a proxy statement submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the company’s plans to go private, the company outlines, in very clear language, that the PC train has hit the buffers.

Outlines are the “various risks and uncertainties related to continued ownership of Common Stock,” and it makes scary reading for anyone operating within the industry, or who holds stock in the company. These are listed as:

“… decreasing revenues in the market for desktop and notebook PCs and the significant uncertainties as to whether, or when, this decrease will end…”
“…the overall difficulty of predicting the market for PCs, as evidenced by the significant revisions in industry forecasts among industry experts and analysts over the past year…”
“…the ongoing downward pricing pressure and trend towards commoditization in the desktop and notebook personal computer market…”

Justin Jin:

Inside the claustrophobic confines of a shipping container erected in the middle of an icy nowhere, a group of Russians wait out another Arctic storm. Anton bakes blinis. Andrei watches a horror movie for the umpteenth time. Alexei tries to craft a toothpaste holder from an empty tin can. Lisa the dog, who finds company among the 100 men in Camp No2, curls up farthest away from the drafty door.

The engineers gathered on this desolate patch of Russian tundra have been hired by a geo-exploration company to look for oil deep below the permafrost. I am waiting out the battering winds with them, to document the international race to secure Arctic resources.

I have made six trips over three years to the Russian Arctic, a 7,000-kilometre-long region stretching atop the planet from Finland to Alaska, upon which Moscow bureaucrats have bestowed the name “Zone of Absolute Discomfort”. The icy hinterland is wretched to live in, but just hospitable enough to allow for the extraction of billions of tonnes of resources trapped beneath the permafrost.

Here, three contrasting ways of life, representing three centuries of Russian history, simultaneously tap the Earth’s resources amid its harshest conditions: indigenous reindeer herders known as Nenets; descendants of former Soviet prisoners; and energy-company men seeking oil and natural gas.

John Green:

I’m asked every day why Hank and I haven’t tried to create a TV show.

We’ve been approached many times to do TV shows, but while we’re happy to listen and discuss ideas with people, we’ve so far turned down these opportunities, even the very tempting and lucrative ones. Here’s why:

1. When you work with a cable channel or production company, you don’t own the show you make or control the manner in which it is distributed.

2. It’s easy—and only getting easier—to watch shows like CrashCourse and SciShow on your TV.

3. We really believe that what is strong and beautiful about nerdfighteria is that we create it—every day—together. All of us. And if we were on TV, I worry we’d lose that sense of connection, which Hank and I have enjoyed so much the last five and a half years. Like, the Sherlock fandom and the Doctor Who fandom are great communities, but they are about Sherlock and Doctor Who. Nerdfighteria isn’t, and never has been, primarily about Hank or me. It’s about celebrating nerdiness and decreasing worldsuck. We really value that and don’t want it to change.

http://www.crowdfundthedebt.com/:

My fellow Americans,

Despite the best efforts of my administration, prolonged partisan debates in Congress are preventing us from a solution to our mounting national debt. Instead of bickering over taxes, we’re taking a new approach: asking everyday Americans to chip in so we can pay off our debt once and for all.

With your help, it’s time to act.

Ed Wallace:

We all know, down in our suspicious hearts, that there’s a miracle vehicle or propulsion system out there that, for some probably profit-related reason, has been kept a deep, dark secret. That’s why we’re so ready to believe in gas pills, cars that create their own hydrogen from water and run forever on nothing, and other such rabbits plucked from invisible hats. But until now, no respected automaker has promised something so esoteric.

As of now, however, just such an automaker is framing its latest promised vehicle as embodying “one of the great propulsion secrets of the automotive industry.” At least, that’s how one of Peugeot’s engineers relayed the story to Tim Lewis of the Guardian newspaper. He told the reporter about a breakthrough technology, so incredible that the car it powers would deliver more than 80 miles per gallon, would be cheaper than a Toyota Prius, and has new technology so sensitive that Peugeot’s engineers couldn’t even tell their wives and children about it. Yes, this is Peugeot’s Hybrid Air, launched at this year’s Geneva Auto Show with the latest promise to “change the automotive industry from this day forward.”

The only problem with all of this is the fact that Peugeot’s Hybrid Air system isn’t really so clever at all.

David Stockman:

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (“clean” energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating “demand,” even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days. The state-wreck originated in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt opted for fiat money (currency not fundamentally backed by gold), economic nationalism and capitalist cartels in agriculture and industry.

Under the exigencies of World War II (which did far more to end the Depression than the New Deal did), the state got hugely bloated, but remarkably, the bloat was put into brief remission during a midcentury golden era of sound money and fiscal rectitude with Dwight D. Eisenhower in the White House and William McChesney Martin Jr. at the Fed.

Tom Agan:

In reality, though, these examples are the exception and not the rule. Consider this: The directors of the five top-grossing films of 2012 are all in their 40s or 50s. And two of the biggest-selling authors of fiction for 2012 — Suzanne Collins and E. L. James — are around 50.

According to research by Alex Mesoudi of Durham University in England, the age of eventual Nobel Prize winners when making a discovery, and of inventors when making a significant breakthrough, averaged around 38 in 2000, an increase of about six years since 1900.

But there is another reason to keep innovators around longer: the time it takes between the birth of an idea and when its implications are broadly understood and acted upon. This education process is typically driven by the innovators themselves.

For Nobel Prize winners, this process usually takes about 20 years — meaning that someone who is 38 at the time of discovery will most likely be nearly 60 when he or she receives the prize. For most eventual laureates, that interval is spent attending and making presentations at conferences, networking with colleagues, writing additional papers, editing academic journals and talking with the press.

Alan Siegel:

At the beginning of “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau makes a concise case against the complexity of modern life. “Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he writes. “[L]et your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail….Simplify, simplify.”

That was the 19th century, though, and we live in the 21st. In a typical day, we encounter dozens—if not dozens upon dozens—of moments when we are delayed, frustrated or confused by complexity. Our lives are filled with gadgets we can’t use (automatic sprinklers, GPS devices, fancy blenders), instructions we can’t follow (labels on medicine bottles, directions for assembling toys or furniture) and forms we can’t decipher (tax returns, gym membership contracts, wireless phone bills).