From Toby Lester at the Boston Globe, a little delayed:

If you’re like most people, you’ll dimly recall from your school days that the name America has something to do with Amerigo Vespucci, a merchant and explorer from Florence. You may also recall feeling that this is more than a little odd — that if any European earned the “right” to have his name attached to the New World, surely it should have been Christopher Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic years before Vespucci did.

But Vespucci, it turns out, had no direct role in the naming of America. He probably died without ever having seen or heard the name. A closer look at how the name was coined and first put on a map, in 1507, suggests that, in fact, the person responsible was a figure almost nobody’s heard of: a young Alsatian proofreader named Matthias Ringmann.

How did a minor scholar working in the landlocked mountains of eastern France manage to beat all explorers to the punch and give the New World its name? The answer is more than just an obscure bit of history, because Ringmann deliberately invested the name America with ideas that still make up important parts of our national psyche: powerful notions of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and even manifest destiny.

And he did it, in part, as a high-minded joke.

Matthias Ringmann was born in an Alsatian village in 1482. After studying the classics at university he settled in the Strasbourg area, where he began to eke out a living by proofing texts for local printers and teaching school. It was a forgettable life, of a sort that countless others like him were leading. But sometime in early 1505, Ringmann came across a recently published pamphlet titled “Mundus Novus,” and that changed everything.

The pamphlet contained a letter purportedly sent by Amerigo Vespucci a few years earlier to his patron in Florence. Vespucci wrote that he had just completed a voyage of western discovery and had big news to report. On the other side of the Atlantic, he announced, he had found “a new world.”

The phrase would stick, of course. But it didn’t mean to Vespucci what it means to us today: a new continent. Europeans of the time often used the phrase simply to describe regions of the world they had not known about before. Another Italian merchant had used the very same phrase, for example, to describe parts of southern Africa recently explored by the Portuguese.

You can read the rest at the link.

Something I didn't actually know until now:

A Farley file is a log kept by politicians on people they have met previously.

It’s named for James Aloysius Farley, who was Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign manager and later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Farley kept a file on anyone Roosevelt met allowing him to “remember” key personal details such as the name of their spouse and children or anything useful which might have come out of earlier meetings.

From my new favorite website, Political Dictionary.

From Robert Reich:

Each of America’s two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation’s total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America’s total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

An animated interview of John Perkins, author of 'HoodWinked' and 'Confessions Of An Economic Hitman.' 

Via.

See here and here.

Yesterday, actress Lindsay Lohan received a 90 day jail sentence after a judge determined Lohan had violated her probation by missing some scheduled classes. Lohan had been previously arrested on a DUI charge. Today, Lohan quotes from a Cato article that critiques the American criminal justice system for its rigid and mechanical sentencing rules.  (Here are her Cato-quoting Tweets: 1,2, 3, 4.) I have received letters from prisoners around the country who have read a Cato publication, or seen a Cato event on C-SPAN, but this is our first celebrity tweet.  The Institute is now abuzz!

I wish more celebrities would take an interest in our legal system because there is so much injusticeto be found there.  Alas, when celebs speak out after they have been personally caught up in the system, their calls for reform come across as self-serving — even when they are sincere.  I wish more Hollywood writers would work criminal justice issues into their scripts.  For example, why not write a popular character out of a show because of an arrest and a mandatory minimum sentence?  In any event, we wish Ms. Lohan well and hope this is her final encounter with the criminal system.

Fareed Zakaria is one of the few reasons I hold CNN in higher regard than all the other 24/7 news outlets. This is one of the better dissenting-anchor-monologues I've seen in a while. Kudos Fareed.

Especially after considering how difficult healthcare reform was? I think this rejected magazine cover for Fortune 500 explains why...

...not a pretty picture. Certainly, no Congressperson (except, perhaps, Barton) is ignorant enough to avidly defend US financial institutions in light of our current predicament.

There's another contributing factor that aided the passage of the financial regulation reform bill: it doesn't do much.

On a macro scale, the causes our last financial crisis are still alive and well. Raghuram Rajan, the former chief economist of the IMF, outlined the US's problems in an NPR interview yesterday. Definitely worth a listen. (Start around the 2-minute mark.)

Rajan points out an alarming trend in our last 3 recessions. We generally have very sharp recoveries out of our recessions. And everyone thinks that's a good thing. In 1991, for instance, we regained all the growth that we had lost during the recession in about 9 months. In 2001, we dug ourselves out of recession after just 3 months. However, it took 23 months after the 1991 recession to build back all the jobs we had lost. In 2001, it took us 38 months. The pattern (now up for a third iteration) is to shed jobs during a recession and then immediately recoup that lost wealth without expanding the workforce. Rather than a recession felt by everyone in the economy, it's more of an "up-suck" of wealth, a consolidation of income among the wealthy. Coming out of the current recession, how long will it take us to find work for the 12-15 million people currently unemployed?

It will certainly take longer than our six-month period of unemployment benefits.

A great spoof on Grindr's effect on gay men in the country's political Mecca. 

Persuasive? Maybe. Hilarious? Definitely.

One of the best TED talks I've seen in months.

Let's say you had $10,000. Do you think you could choose the best stocks to invest in? Do you think you could appraise a set of oil paintings and figure out which one you should buy? Do you think you could determine which of three start-up bands were going to make it big?

No. You couldn't. In the same way that the average person has virtually no ability to form a credible opinion of an opera singer's quality, the best way to heat a suburban home, or (sadly) the superior literary value of Upton Sinclair over Stephanie Meyer, you couldn't. For the vast majority of subjects, people have weak opinions—and rightly so, because people have a very narrow understanding of the vast majority of subjects.

Unfortunately, this isn't the case for politics. Politics is one of those few arenas in which it's somehow permissible to have a completely unfounded, calcified opinion. It's okay to create an opinion on the spot, to rant ad nauseum about some particular policy initiative or ideological standing. For some reason, it's often overlooked that public affairs is just as confusing as computer coding. Yet there are many people that get very angry about some perceived injustice. Perhaps they're quick to anger because they, on some unconscious level, recognize how little they know about public policy and yet, realizing that politics ultimately affects them, feel the impulse to have an opinion.

Isaac Asimov says it best:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"

Realize that politics, like poetry, medicine, history, law, or every other substantial field, requires the expertise garnered from thousands of hours of study. If you're not stupid enough to talk about any of these things with false certainty, don't be so confident as to think you can become an authority on foreign affairs or the welfare state in less than several years of investigation.

From NASA's Near Earth Orbit Program:

It has been estimated that the mineral wealth resident in the belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter would be equivalent to about $100 billion for every person on Earth today.