Katherine Bourzac:

If biologists could put computational controls inside living cells, they could program them to sense and report on the presence of cancer, create drugs on site as they’re needed, or dynamically adjust their activities in fermentation tanks used to make drugs and other chemicals. Now researchers at Stanford University have developed a way to make genetic parts that can perform the logic calculations that might someday control such activities.

The Stanford researchers’ genetic logic gate can be used to perform the full complement of digital logic tasks, and it can store information, too. It works by making changes to the cell’s genome, creating a kind of transcript of the cell’s activities that can be read out later with a DNA sequencer. The researchers call their invention a “transcriptor” for its resemblance to the transistor in electronics. “We want to make tools to put computers inside any living cell—a little bit of data storage, a way to communicate, and logic,” says Drew Endy, the bioengineering professor at Stanford who led the work.

Timothy Lu, who leads the Synthetic Biology Group at MIT, is working on similar cellular logic tools. “You can’t deliver a silicon chip into cells inside the body, so you have to build circuits out of DNA and proteins,” Lu says. “The goal is not to replace computers, but to open up biological applications that conventional computing simply cannot address.”

A Martin Luther Sermon on Good Friday:

1. In the first place, some reflect upon the sufferings of Christ in a way that they become angry at the Jews, sing and lament about poor Judas, and are then satisfied; just like by habit they complain of other persons, and condemn and spend their time with their enemies. Such an exercise may truly be called a meditation not on the sufferings of Christ, but on the wickedness of Judas and the Jews.

2. In the second place, others have pointed out the different benefits and fruits springing from a consideration of Christ’s Passion. Here the saying ascribed to Albertus is misleading, that to think once superficially on the sufferings of Christ is better than to fast a whole year or to pray the Psalter every day, etc. The people thus blindly follow him and act contrary to the true fruits of Christ’s Passion; for they seek therein their own selfish interests. Therefore they decorate themselves with pictures and booklets, with letters and crucifixes, and some go so far as to imagine that they thus protect themselves against the perils of water, of fire, and of the sword, and all other dangers. In this way the suffering of Christ is to work in them an absence of suffering, which is contrary to its nature and character.

3. A third class so sympathize with Christ as to weep and lament for him because he was so innocent, like the women who followed Christ from Jerusalem, whom he rebuked, in that they should better weep for themselves and for their children. Such are they who run far away in the midst of the Passion season, and are greatly benefitted by the departure of Christ from Bethany and by the pains and sorrows of the Virgin Mary, but they never get farther. Hence they postpone the Passion many hours, and God only knows whether it is devised more for sleeping than for watching. And among these fanatics are those who taught what great blessings come from the holy mass, and in their simple way they think it is enough if they attend mass. To this we are led through the sayings of certain teachers, that the mass opere operati, non opere operantis, is acceptable of itself, even without our merit and worthiness, just as if that were enough. Nevertheless the mass was not instituted for the sake of its own worthi-

John Cassidy:

Most scandals involving the cozy relationship between Wall Street and its regulators play out behind closed doors. Others happen in plain view, and this is one of the latter. In a Manhattan courtroom Thursday, a federal judge held a hearing on whether to approve a legal settlement in which Steven A. Cohen, one of the richest and most publicity-shy men in the country, appears to be buying off the U.S. government, which for years has been investigating wrongdoing in and around his hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisers.

Unless the judge, Victor Marrero, rejects the settlement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and SAC, which was announced a couple of weeks ago, Cohen will be free to go about his business, which has long been clouded by suspicions of insider trading, once he writes a check of six hundred and sixteen million dollars to the Securities and Exchange Commission. There will be no further sanctions and no admission of wrongdoing. And in fact, Cohen already appears to be celebrating. According to a report in the Times, he has just purchased a Picasso painting, “Le Rêve,” for a hundred and fifty-five million dollars, and an ocean-front mansion in East Hampton, for sixty million dollars.

To his credit, Judge Marrero has, at least for now, refused to go along with this travesty. Reserving judgement on the case, he asked why the settlement didn’t include an admission of wrongdoing on the part of SAC and Cohen. “There is something counterintuitive and incongruous about settling for six hundred million dollars if it truly did nothing wrong,” the judge said. (A lawyer for SAC told the judge that the firm paid the fine because it didn’t want litigation hanging over its head for years.)

Stan Alcorn:

To theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann, the borders of the United States are out of date.

“Some are kind of arbitrary like New Mexico, Arizona: They’re just kind of drawn on the map,” says Brockmann. “Often, they no longer correlate with our behavior.”

Specifically, they no longer correlate with how we move.

Brockmann was doing research on human mobility in 2005, and struggling to find useful sources of data, when on the way back from a conference in Canada, he stopped by the home of his old friend Dennis Derryberry in the green mountains of Vermont. Over a beer on the porch, he told Derryberry about his research. Derryberry asked: “Do you know about WheresGeorge.com?”

You can think of WheresGeorge.com as a primitive FourSquare for $1 bills. “Georgers”–as users call themselves–“check in” their bills by entering the zip codes and serial numbers, then write or stamp “wheresgeorge.com” on the bill. If someone finds the bill and enters it again, they get a “hit.” The top Georger–an ammunition dealer who goes by the handle Wattsburg Gary–has entered more than 2 million bills and has nearly half a million hits.

Steve Coll:

In 2007, John Kiriakou was settling into a lucrative life as a former spy. His fourteen-year career as a C.I.A. officer had included thrilling, if occasionally hazardous, tours as a specialist in counterterrorism. In Athens, in 1999 and 2000, he recruited several foreign agents to spy for the United States, and at one point was nearly assassinated by leftists. In Pakistan, in 2002, he chased Al Qaeda members, and when Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda logistics leader, was wounded and captured, Kiriakou guarded his bedside. (Kiriakou recounted many of his exploits in a colorful memoir, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the C.I.A.’s War on Terror.”) In 2004, he retired, and soon took a job with the accounting and consulting firm DeLoitte. He worked in the field of corporate intelligence and advised Hollywood filmmakers on the side.

At the time, the press was looking into allegations that C.I.A. officers and contractors were involved in torture, and it wasn’t long before they sought out Kiriakou for comment. For several years, the agency had managed to keep secret the scope of its abusive interrogations of Al Qaeda-affiliated prisoners, which had the formal approval of President George W. Bush. Gradually, however, investigative reporters revealed details of the interrogations, and in 2006 Bush acknowledged the existence of the C.I.A.’s detention program. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained confirming documents through the Freedom of Information Act, but what the public knew often came from journalists quoting anonymous sources.

On December 6, 2007, the Times published a story by Mark Mazzetti revealing that the C.I.A. had made classified videotapes of harsh interrogations, Abu Zubaydah’s among them. The tapes were made in 2002, but the agency destroyed them three years later. Jose Rodriguez, who then led the National Clandestine Service, had ordered the tapes destroyed, despite reservations expressed by others in the Bush Administration. . . .

Ed Wallace::

For British teenagers who fell in love with rock and roll, the 50s and early 60s were tough times. The conservative government and liberal songwriters’ union had all but conspired to keep young Brits from even hearing the new youth oriented music genre that was sweeping the globe. The BBC declined to cater to this rowdy generation, while the songwriters’ union had a rule in force that kept the BBC from playing any record more than once a day, regardless of its popularity.

To hear the hit records, kids like John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Ray Davies and others had to listen to Radio Luxembourg at night, when its broadcasts could be heard in England. But this too was unsatisfactory; record labels such as EMI were buying those nighttime shows, but with the provision that only half of any song could be played. The labels thought that if the kids heard half a song and liked it, they’d be more likely to go out and purchase the record.
In 1964, led by the Beatles, the British Invasion conquered America. The irony was that it wasn’t being heard in Britain. London may have been swinging, but it wasn’t to its own music.
That sorry situation would lead to the rise of the Pirate Radio Ships, most notably at first Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta. Anchored in international waters off the coast of England, these two ships broadcast rock and roll songs in their entirety. However, their station formats were sloppy, nothing like the Top Forty format at Dallas’ KLIF, which then controlled 45 percent of that city’s daytime listening audience. But the fact that illegal radio stations were cutting in on the BBC’s action with kids in England was big news. And in early 1964 the Wall Street Journal ran the story.

:

It’s dark, very dark indeed, with thick cloud blanking the sliver of moon. The farmhouse sits squat and black on the peak of the hill, and only the headlights reveal it as we rattle up the track. There are four of us in the Jeep and we’ve come to see something die.

In rural Spain, pigs are still killed the traditional way as part of a family event called a matanza – literally “a slaughter”. The family members would gather so that when the animal was killed, there would be enough willing hands to process everything that could be preserved, as quickly as possible. Then, the store cupboard stocked until the next killing, that which couldn’t be laid away was consumed on the spot – a brief celebration of plenty before returning to the hard life of the farm.

I’d come to Extremadura – along with Simon Mullins, co-founder of the Salt Yard Group of Spanish and Italian restaurants in London, and Ben Tish, the group’s executive chef – to watch a little piece of cultural history played out and to participate. But we’d also come to see a slaughter more real than most will ever experience. There is a natural inquisitiveness about death. There’s a moral aspect for a meat eater in connecting with the living animal that has to die for you, and there’s the challenge: how will you handle yourself? Witnessing the process has become a rite of passage for a certain kind of serious food lover, so we’d come to join a family matanza, we’d come to learn about Ibérico pigs, but, at the core of it all, we had come to see something die.

Matt Taibbi:

I went yesterday to a screening of We Steal Secrets, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s brilliant new documentary about Wikileaks. The movie is beautiful and profound, an incredible story that’s about many things all at once, including the incredible Shakespearean narrative that is the life of Julian Assange, a free-information radical who has become an uncompromising guarder of secrets.

I’ll do a full review in a few months, when We Steal Secrets comes out, but I bring it up now because the whole issue of secrets and how we keep them is increasingly in the news, to the point where I think we’re headed for a major confrontation between the government and the public over the issue, one bigger in scale than even the Wikileaks episode.

We’ve seen the battle lines forming for years now. It’s increasingly clear that governments, major corporations, banks, universities and other such bodies view the defense of their secrets as a desperate matter of institutional survival, so much so that the state has gone to extraordinary lengths to punish and/or threaten to punish anyone who so much as tiptoes across the informational line.

This is true not only in the case of Wikileaks – and especially the real subject of Gibney’s film, Private Bradley Manning, who in an incredible act of institutional vengeance is being charged with aiding the enemy (among other crimes) and could, theoretically, receive a death sentence.

Did the Mainstream Media Fail Bradley Manning?

There’s also the horrific case of Aaron Swartz, a genius who helped create the technology behind Reddit at the age of 14, who earlier this year hanged himself after the government threatened him with 35 years in jail for downloading a bunch of academic documents from an MIT server. Then there’s the case of Sergey Aleynikov, the Russian computer programmer who allegedly stole the High-Frequency Trading program belonging to Goldman, Sachs (Aleynikov worked at Goldman), a program which prosecutors in open court admitted could, “in the wrong hands,” be used to “manipulate markets.”

Aleynikov spent a year in jail awaiting trial, was convicted, had his sentence overturned, was freed, and has since been re-arrested by a government seemingly determined to make an example out of him.

The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz

Jeffrey Marlow:

The alarm clock goes off at 1:45 a.m., and no one’s particularly happy about it. Getting and staying warm in our tent at Orizaba’s 14,000-foot base camp wasn’t easy, and now it’s time to venture into the cold.

I’m in southern Mexico, on the flanks of the continent’s third tallest mountain, preparing for a summit attempt with fellow climbers Patrick Sanan, Joel Scheingross, and Josh Zahl. We had left the oxygen-dense altitudes of southern California just two days earlier, and I was skeptical of my body’s ability to handle such a quick displacement to Orizaba’s 18,500-foot summit. But the sky was clear and everyone was feeling good: there was no time to waste.

Climbing ice-capped mountains in the middle of the night makes practical sense – getting up, down, and off the glacier before the afternoon sun loosens rocks and renders the slope a slippery waterslide is a good idea – but it also has psychological allure. If you can’t see the peak looming over you, you’re forced to focus on each step, unburdened by the hours of climbing to come. And it’s a lot easier to delude yourself into thinking you’re almost there.

Carmen Nobel
:

“I tell my students that they’ll get a better framework in this 14-week course than I got in 14 years at the school of hard knocks,” Huber says. “General Motors spent a billion dollars on my tuition. That was the negative cash flow we invested in OnStar before it turned profitable.”

The HBS Class of 1979 produced a raft of high-profile executives, including Meg Whitman, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard; Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program; John Thain, chairman and CEO of CIT Group; Elaine L. Chao, the 24th US Secretary of Labor; and, fortuitously, Clay Christensen, the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at HBS, and the world’s foremost authority on disruptive innovation.

“Clay was always that guy in class who would say these off-the-wall things, and we’d say to ourselves, ‘That was either really brilliant or really stupid,’ but we couldn’t figure out which one,” Huber recalls. “And of course they were all brilliant. But unfortunately for most of us normal humans, we never wrote them down. We could have stolen his ideas back then, but we didn’t know they’d become famous.”

After graduation, Huber didn’t expect their career paths to cross again. But several years later, Christensen would realize that the OnStar story was a great example of navigating innovation within a large company.