"We do not need to further incentivize entrepreneurs and investors to start companies–they already have plenty of incentives to do so... It is silly to think that "entrepreneurs and investors" create the jobs in our economy. Entrepreneurs and investors start and fund companies, which is important. But what actually creates self-sustaining jobs and a growing economy is customers who want and can pay for companies' products and services. Without these customers, there's no job creation." READ MORE

I love watching an argument unfold across the Internet. Here's a thread that bounced from evangelist-loudmouth-romanticizer to startup engineer to VC where everyone's right and everyone's a bit wrong too. READ MORE

There was a full house on hand last night at New York's Housing Works Cafe and Bookstore for an Occupy Wall St. panel organized by n+1, Brooklyn's hometown literary journal. The panel was larger than advertised, totaling seven in addition to moderator and n+1 progenitor Keith Gessen. A healthy mix of contributors were on board: there was the earnest, washed-up political wonk who'd been sleeping in Zucotti Park for a month now, the filmmaker who'd been downtown since the very first meeting, the SEIU representative and the education policy activist; there were youngs and olds, students and professionals, seasoned organizers and first time protesters. READ MORE

Here's a good question: what if the discomfort expressed, on different fronts and with rationales, by the Malcolm Gladwells and Bill Kellers and the Zadie Smiths and whoever else hates the Face-Twitters now, was mostly just a love of (or addiction to?) narrative? Facebook stories don't really have any endings, and neither do they always have multiple conflicting sources (not like the newspapers have much of that either anyway). "At the end of every magazine article, before the "■," is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There's the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic." Newspapers, magazines and procedurals are the last forms hanging on to tidy endings. The rest of us are just, like, living here.

51. Pert Plus READ MORE

We're on record for being con on war-mongering pro-colonialist Harvard biz school prof Niall Ferguson, but here is a substantial accounting of Fergusonianism and his Civilization: The West and the Rest. (Warning: green type on black background!) It's pretty choice. READ MORE

"So, like, we need to send something important to someone somewhere else so you’re saying we just, uhh, leave it in a box by the street? And we’re just to trust somebody to come get it and make sure it gets to the right person?" That is an excellent point. Man, we would be on Quora mocking the heck out of that business model. And then? Our theorist goes on: "I think if mail were to be invented today, too many people would be a little bit too curious about how they could manipulate it and they would go online and join forums to discuss it and they would wind up creating this whole ecosystem of weirdos who are interested in screwing with the mail, feeding off each other and stewing in their own obsession until their sick little games are somehow legitimated by society to enough of a degree to validate it as something people are 'born with,' like furries and those guys who fuck pillows with faces stitched into them."

I have not always been a Peter Thiel fan—the PayPal founder and Facebook investor's politics and ideas are complicated and sometimes they stem from what I would consider psychological projections (see: affirmative action, although even in that case I totally agree with his embracing a larger concept of "diversity"!)—but honestly, I am on board with about 75% of this extended interview with him in the National Review. One idea in particular is extremely valuable, and we will all be talking about this a lot in the next decade: that America has group-hallucinated itself into an education bubble. READ MORE

"In the ’90s, when we were afraid of ‘selling out,’ we hated the gatekeepers, the mainstream corporate culture that assimilated and corrupted the underground. Now that the mainstream has fragmented, we see it as just another tool to get our message across, and our animosity has been forced to move on to another bugbear that is, like mass culture, ultimately a version of ourselves: the fake hipster."