Editorial: Singapore’s Angry Migrant Workers

Frustration among Singapore's unappreciated and underpaid migrant workers has been building in recent years as their numbers have grown faster than the country can accommodate them. Tensions boiled over earlier this month, after a 33-year-old Indian migrant worker was killed by a bus in the Little India neighborhood. A crowd of fellow workers from South Asia gathered at the scene. Their anger quickly escalated, with some 400 people pelting stones, attacking emergency responders and setting fire to vehicles. It was the worst riot to hit Singapore, one of the world's most orderly countries, since 1969.

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Singapore's government has denied that its treatment of migrant workers has anything to do with the riot. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong characterized the riot as "an isolated incident caused by an unruly mob." Hundreds of foreign workers were rounded up and questioned; 25 face charges punishable by up to seven years' imprisonment and caning. Two hundred migrant workers were issued advisories against any future disruptive conduct.

Singapore has one of the world's highest standards of living, but its population is shrinking and aging. To fuel economic growth, transient imported labor has risen dramatically over recent years. The proportion of non-Singaporeans in Singapore rose from 14 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2010. Many Singaporeans are alarmed by the rapid increase of low-paid migrant workers, which has widened social divides and strained the small country's transportation and housing capacities.

Migrant laborers are paid as little as 2 Singapore dollars, or $1.60, per hour. Few speak fluent English, the country's working language, and most live in crowded dormitories away from residential areas. They typically are at the mercy of employers, owe high debt to hiring agents and have few means of expressing grievances. Last year, 200 Bangladeshi workers protested unpaid wages and Chinese bus drivers refused to report to work to protest salaries lower than their Singaporean and Malay counterparts.

The government hopes to increase the overall population from 5.4 million to 6.9 million by 2030. Because the birthrate of Singaporeans is below replacement levels and permanent residency is tightly controlled, the bulk of the increase will have to come from temporary migration, further skewing the ratio of transient workers to citizens. Many Singaporeans are lukewarm to the idea.

Casting the riot in Little India as an isolated law-and-order problem does not address Singapore's larger demographic problem. If Singapore is to preserve its high standard of living, it must ensure that the millions of transient workers who contribute so much to the economy are not marginalized and abused.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Greeting the New Year

This is the season of lists: roundups and recaps, forecasts and resolutions.

What was the biggest story of the year? Snowden.

The best movie? "12 Years a Slave."

The splashiest pop culture moment? Twerk, Miley!

Will the health care rollout roll over the president's second-term agenda? Who'll win in 2016? Who are the people to watch? Can Pope Francis top his 2013 cool points?

We resolve to go back to the gym and lose a few pounds, to pay off that credit card debt and up our savings, and to tell that overbearing boss to "chill out!"

I must say that as corny as it all is, I'm always entertained by it. In fact, "entertained" may be too mild a word. I'm enthralled by it, mostly because I connect with the more profound undercurrent of the moment: the idea of marking endings and beginnings, the ideas of commemoration and anticipation.

For that reason, the new year has always been my favorite time of the year.

When I was growing up, we had our own rural, Southern ways to mark it. Some folks spent New Year's Eve at watch night church services, singing and praying and testifying. My brothers and I spent ours in front of the television waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. Then, as the clock struck midnight and folks on television kissed and cheered and celebrated in a blizzard of confetti, we stepped outside to listen as old men blasted shotguns into the perfect darkness of the Louisiana night sky. Finally, we ate black-eyed peas (for good luck) and cooked greens (for good fortune). As the saying went, "Eat poor on New Year's, and eat fat the rest of the year." Things didn't always work out that way, but hope was always heavy in the bowls of those old spoons.

To me, New Year's was always a time of lightness and optimism in a world full of darkness. Anything could be, no matter what had been.

I never really made resolutions when I was young. But the older I've gotten, the more I've felt that resolutions are necessary, as much for the forced articulation of goals as for the setting of them.

So this year, these are my resolutions:

1. To stop treating politicians like sports stars, political parties like teams and our national debate like sport.

Politics is not a game. There are real lives hanging in the balance of the decisions made — or not made — by those in power. Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.

2. To force politicians to remember, with as much force and fervor as my pen can muster, that they are servants, not rulers.

A democracy is a government by the people, for the people. Politicians too often bend in the presence of power. They believe that it is they who possess power, rather than the people who elected them. And power and money are kissing cousins; you will rarely find one not cozied up to the other. Money is corruptive, and power addictive. Together they work against the greater good. That cannot stand.

3. To remember that justice is a natural aching of human morality.

In the core of most people is an overwhelming desire to see others treated fairly and dealt with honestly. That is not a party-line impulse but a universal one. I will do my best to highlight that basic quality. For instance, I believe that there will come a time when we will all look back at the brouhaha over same-sex marriage in disbelief and disgrace, and ask: Why was that even a debate?

4. To focus more fully on the power and beauty of the human spirit.

Regardless of their politics, the vast majority of the people I meet, when they can speak and listen and act of their own accord and not in concert with a group, are good, decent and caring people. Most work hard or want to. They love their families and like their neighbors. They will give until it hurts. They fall down, but they bounce back. They are just real people, struggling to get a bit and get by, and hoping to share a laugh and a hug with an honest heart or two along the way. That is no small observation and not one of little consequence. I believe that I can write more about those traits.

Those are my resolutions, ones I will strive to keep, ones I'll reflect on even if I fall short. What are yours?

Happy New Year.

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Editorial: Despair at Guantánamo

In April, when a hunger strike by detainees at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was in its third month, Pentagon officials agreed with defense lawyers that the underlying cause was a growing despair among prisoners who have been in detention for a decade with no hope of getting out. The protest, which at its height involved 106 of the 166 prisoners there this summer, served to put the Guantánamo issue back on the radar in Washington.

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The National Defense Authorization Act for 2014, signed on Thursday by President Obama, includes a long-sought provision easing the Pentagon's ability to transfer to countries other than the United States detainees rated as low threats. Mr. Obama, who has wavered on his early vows to shut down the prison, praised Congress for this change, though he stressed that the prison remained a blight on the nation's reputation.

The improved transfer policy helps, but a petty policy change at the prison this month shows how perverse the situation has become. The military says it will no longer report the number of prisoners on hunger strike, according to a report in the Miami Herald. A spokesman for the facility said the military "will not further their protests by reporting the numbers to the public." The numbers of detainees being force-fed by prison authorities, which dropped into the teens in recent months, offered the world a window into the prison, which has been shrouded in secrecy even though its motto is "safe, humane, legal, transparent detention."

Eighty-six of the remaining prisoners — more than half — were designated three years ago for transfer to another country, provided that security concerns could be satisfied. Yet the transfer plan was left adrift in the face of political combat. Even if the new defense bill spurs progress in reducing the detainee population, the delivery of credible justice for those at the Guantánamo prison camp is far from complete.

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Editorial: This Week, Mass Surveillance Wins

Has the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans' phone records actually helped to prevent terrorist attacks?

No, according to the 300-page report issued this month by a panel of legal and intelligence experts appointed by President Obama.

Yet in a ruling issued on Friday, Judge William Pauley III of the Federal District Court in Manhattan came to the opposite conclusion. "The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed," Judge Pauley wrote in a deeply troubling decision dismissing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the N.S.A.'s bulk data collection program.

The ruling, which repeatedly defers to the government's benign characterization of its own surveillance programs, demonstrates once more the importance of fixing the law at its source, rather than waiting for further interpretations by higher courts.

Judge Pauley's opinion largely disregards the concerns central to the presidential panel's report and the ruling on Dec. 16 by a federal district judge in Washington, Richard Leon, who found that the agency's program was "significantly likely" to be unconstitutional.

The government's claim that the program is constitutional rests on a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which held that a robbery suspect had no expectation of privacy — and no Fourth Amendment protection — in the telephone numbers he dialed. Judge Leon found the Smith decision to be inapplicable to a daily, indiscriminate sweep of hundreds of millions of phone records. Judge Pauley, however, said its logic still applied.

Judge Pauley's opinion is perplexing in its near-total acceptance of the claim by the government that it almost always acts in accordance with the law and quickly self-corrects when it does not. For example, Judge Pauley said the N.S.A.'s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, was being "crystal clear" when he responded to charges that the agency was mining data from phone calls by saying: "We're not authorized to do it. We aren't doing it."

That shows an alarming lack of skepticism, particularly in light of the testimony of James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who falsely told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting any type of data at all on hundreds of millions of Americans.

It is also incorrect to say, as Judge Pauley does, that there is "no evidence" that the government has used the phone data for anything other than terrorism investigations. An inspector general's report in September revealed at least a dozen instances in which government employees used the databases for personal purposes.

The presidential panel made many good recommendations to reform both the surveillance law and the intelligence court that rules on government surveillance requests. Congress and Mr. Obama should adopt as many of these as possible. Court rulings will not suffice to rein in an agency that continues to take advantage of the law's vague and malleable standards.

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Editorial: Summer Camp That Makes a Difference

Yancy Rivera's son Brian, 11, is autistic and painfully shy. Summers used to be the worst time, with Brian out of school and spending his days watching TV. So Ms. Rivera, a single mother who works in a Lower East Side pharmacy to support him and his older brother, began searching three years ago for a summer day camp.

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The first camp Brian attended terrified him; he lasted three days. A colleague told Ms. Rivera about Henry Street Settlement, a social service agency that provides dozens of programs, including Camp Henry, a summer camp just two blocks from the pharmacy. Staff members were friendly and seemed equipped to handle kids like Brian. They said they would work with him one on one.

After his first day at Camp Henry, Brian told his mom, "It's different." After the second day, he said, "It's not so bad." And after the third day, he gave the camp a thumbs up. Brian went to the camp in 2011 and 2012. But this past summer, Ms. Rivera couldn't afford the $500 fee. The camp turned to the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, an organization supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which paid the fee. Ms. Rivera and Brian were both delighted.

"I used to dread summers," Ms. Rivera said. But finding the right camp for Brian has been a huge relief — and very rewarding. Last summer, he learned to ride a bike.

Donations to The Times's Neediest Cases Fund go to seven charities: Brooklyn Community Services; Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York; Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens; the Children's Aid Society; the Community Service Society of New York; the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies; and the UJA-Federation of New York. To help, please send a check to: The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, 4 Chase Metrotech Center, 7th Floor East, Lockbox 5193, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11245. Or call (800) 381-0075 and use a credit card. You may also donate at www.nytneediestcases.com.

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Editorial: Risky Nationalism in Japan

On Thursday, one year after coming to power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Yasukuni, the controversial Shinto shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including war criminals from World War II. China and South Korea swiftly criticized the move, as did the United States. Mr. Abe's visit will worsen Japan's already tense relations with China and South Korea, which see the shrine as a symbol of imperial Japan's wars of aggression and colonialism. The United States Embassy said America was "disappointed that Japan's leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan's neighbors."

The question is why Mr. Abe decided to visit Yasukuni now. It had been seven years since a Japanese prime minister visited the shrine, a recognition at the highest levels that the site is symbolically repugnant to China and South Korea and that such a visit is detrimental to relations with them. Japan's relations with those two nations are worse now than during the mid-2000s. Both Chinese and South Korean leaders have refused to meet with Mr. Abe since he became prime minister in 2012 (his first stint as prime minister was 2006-7), in part because of issues over territory in the East China Sea and Korean comfort women, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Paradoxically, it is Chinese and South Korean pressure on these fronts that has allowed Mr. Abe to think a visit to Yasukuni is a good idea. China's belligerent moves in the past year over Japanese-administered islets has convinced the Japanese public that there is a Chinese military threat. This issue has given Mr. Abe cover to ignore all the signals from China and to pursue his goal of transforming the Japanese military from one that is strictly for territorial defense to one that can go to war anywhere. The visit to Yasukuni is part of that agenda.

South Korea's continuing and sharp criticism of Japan's grudging stance on the comfort women issue and the refusal by President Park Geun-hye to meet Mr. Abe to discuss the issue have sown distrust of South Korea among Japanese citizens, nearly half of whom, polls say, also see South Korea as a military threat. Such views among voters have effectively given Mr. Abe license to act without regard to the reactions in Beijing and Seoul.

The three major national newspapers — Yomiuri, Asahi and Mainichi — have been editorializing against a prime ministerial visit to Yasukuni, especially in the year since Mr. Abe took office. And more important for Mr. Abe and his nationalist supporters, Emperor Akihito has refused to visit Yasukuni, as did Emperor Hirohito before him.

Mr. Abe's ultimate goal is to rewrite Japan's pacifist Constitution, written by Americans during the postwar occupation, which restricts the right to go to war. Here, too, Emperor Akihito disapproves, though he has no political power under the Constitution. A few days before Mr. Abe visited Yasukuni, the emperor, in comments marking his 80th birthday, expressed his "deep appreciation" toward those who wrote the post-1945 constitution in order to preserve the "precious values of peace and democracy."

So, if history is the problem, Chinese and South Korean leaders will find allies in Tokyo, and they should meet Mr. Abe to confront, to negotiate and to resolve these issues. Their refusal to meet will only give Mr. Abe license to do what he wants. Japan's military adventures are only possible with American support; the United States needs to make it clear that Mr. Abe's agenda is not in the region's interest. Surely what is needed in Asia is trust among states, and his actions undermine that trust.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Fear Economy

More than a million unemployed Americans are about to get the cruelest of Christmas "gifts." They're about to have their unemployment benefits cut off. You see, Republicans in Congress insist that if you haven't found a job after months of searching, it must be because you aren't trying hard enough. So you need an extra incentive in the form of sheer desperation.

As a result, the plight of the unemployed, already terrible, is about to get even worse. Obviously those who have jobs are much better off. Yet the continuing weakness of the labor market takes a toll on them, too. So let's talk a bit about the plight of the employed.

Some people would have you believe that employment relations are just like any other market transaction; workers have something to sell, employers want to buy what they offer, and they simply make a deal. But anyone who has ever held a job in the real world — or, for that matter, seen a Dilbert cartoon — knows that it's not like that.

The fact is that employment generally involves a power relationship: you have a boss, who tells you what to do, and if you refuse, you may be fired. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. If employers value their workers, they won't make unreasonable demands. But it's not a simple transaction. There's a country music classic titled "Take This Job and Shove It." There isn't and won't be a song titled "Take This Consumer Durable and Shove It."

So employment is a power relationship, and high unemployment has greatly weakened workers' already weak position in that relationship.

We can actually quantify that weakness by looking at the quits rate — the percentage of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs (as opposed to being fired) each month. Obviously, there are many reasons a worker might want to leave his or her job. Quitting is, however, a risk; unless a worker already has a new job lined up, he or she doesn't know how long it will take to find a new job, and how that job will compare with the old one.

And the risk of quitting is much greater when unemployment is high, and there are many more people seeking jobs than there are job openings. As a result, you would expect to see the quits rate rise during booms, fall during slumps — and, indeed, it does. Quits plunged during the 2007-9 recession, and they have only partially rebounded, reflecting the weakness and inadequacy of our economic recovery.

Now think about what this means for workers' bargaining power. When the economy is strong, workers are empowered. They can leave if they're unhappy with the way they're being treated and know that they can quickly find a new job if they are let go. When the economy is weak, however, workers have a very weak hand, and employers are in a position to work them harder, pay them less, or both.

Is there any evidence that this is happening? And how. The economic recovery has, as I said, been weak and inadequate, but all the burden of that weakness is being borne by workers. Corporate profits plunged during the financial crisis, but quickly bounced back, and they continued to soar. Indeed, at this point, after-tax profits are more than 60 percent higher than they were in 2007, before the recession began. We don't know how much of this profit surge can be explained by the fear factor — the ability to squeeze workers who know that they have no place to go. But it must be at least part of the explanation. In fact, it's possible (although by no means certain) that corporate interests are actually doing better in a somewhat depressed economy than they would if we had full employment.

What's more, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that this reality helps explain why our political system has turned its backs on the unemployed. No, I don't believe that there's a secret cabal of C.E.O.'s plotting to keep the economy weak. But I do think that a major reason why reducing unemployment isn't a political priority is that the economy may be lousy for workers, but corporate America is doing just fine.

And once you understand this, you also understand why it's so important to change those priorities.

There's been a somewhat strange debate among progressives lately, with some arguing that populism and condemnations of inequality are a diversion, that full employment should instead be the top priority. As some leading progressive economists have pointed out, however, full employment is itself a populist issue: weak labor markets are a main reason workers are losing ground, and the excessive power of corporations and the wealthy is a main reason we aren't doing anything about jobs.

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

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Editorial: New Victories for Marriage Equality

With every new court ruling or legislative enactment or popular vote affirming Americans' fundamental right to marry, the arguments against same-sex marriage sound increasingly desperate and hollow.

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Those arguments were dealt multiple blows in the past few days, first last Friday when a federal district judge in Utah invalidated the state's constitutional amendment and laws prohibiting marriage between anyone other than a woman and a man. The suit had been brought by three lesbian and gay couples, but Judge Robert Shelby's ruling immediately allowed same-sex couples to marry statewide, and by Christmas Day about 700 had.

On Monday, another federal district judge, Timothy Black, ruled that Ohio, which also does not permit same-sex marriage, must recognize such marriages performed in other states.

Judge Shelby relied largely on the reasoning of United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court's decision in June that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. He ruled that Utah's Constitution and laws, which "demean the dignity" of same-sex couples "for no rational reason," violated the United States Constitution's guarantees of due process and equal protection. The United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit declined to stay the ruling, and the state plans to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Judge Shelby has laid out a thoughtful and methodical defense of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. He allowed that marriage laws are generally left to the states, but he explained that individual rights must trump states' rights where the two conflict. Citing the Supreme Court's 1967 decision striking down laws against interracial marriage, Judge Shelby wrote that the Constitution "protects an individual's ability to make deeply personal choices about love and family free from government interference."

In response to the plaintiffs' complaint, Utah failed to present any rational connection between its laws and a legitimate governmental purpose. During a hearing earlier this month, Judge Shelby repeatedly pressed the state's lawyers to explain how, as they contended, permitting same-sex marriages would undermine the incentive for opposite-sex couples to marry and have children. Their response: "We just simply don't know." Of course, it "defies reason," as the judge wrote, that same-sex marriages would affect opposite-sex marriages one way or another.

Arguments like these are nothing more than the fading recitation of long-ingrained prejudices. The defenders of "traditional" marriage are losing — and much faster than anyone might have predicted even last summer.

Anyone, that is, besides Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the court's most reliable votes against equal rights for gays and lesbians. In his angry dissent from the landmark 2003 decision striking down anti-sodomy laws, Justice Scalia asked: If states may no longer pass laws that express moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, "what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage" to same-sex couples? In a similarly hostile dissent in the Windsor case, he predicted that the court's logic would soon lead to the invalidation of state laws banning same-sex marriage. So far, Justice Scalia has largely been proved right.

If Utah's appeal is heard by the Supreme Court, the court should extend its repeated invocation of the equal dignity of gays and lesbians and strike down all bans on same-sex marriage.

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Editorial: South Sudan’s Imperiled Future

Two years after South Sudan declared independence from Sudan, political tensions between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the former vice president, have erupted into violence, raising the possibility of civil war and ethnic cleansing.

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Some 50,000 civilians are seeking protection at United Nations bases across South Sudan. The United Nations Security Council voted on Tuesday to nearly double its peacekeeping force in that country to 12,500 troops and now must make sure that those reinforcements arrive as soon as possible.

There is fault on both sides. Mr. Kiir's initial accusation that Mr. Machar, a rival and critic of the Kiir government, was plotting a coup against him likely was overblown. The violence has its roots in a longstanding political rivalry, ethnic tensions and the fact that in July, Mr. Kiir, who comes from the Dinka tribe, fired Mr. Machar, who is a Nuer. Since then, Mr. Machar has allied himself with other rebel groups and has refused to negotiate unless his political allies are freed from detention.

The leader of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, Hilde Johnson, said on Thursday that "well over a thousand" people have been killed in 11 days of fighting.

Fears of a broader blood bath are growing, as are concerns that the country will unravel; that production at South Sudan-based oil fields, which are crucial to the economies of both Sudan and South Sudan, will be interrupted; and the fighting will draw in neighboring countries. On Thursday, rebels loyal to Mr. Machar captured some oil wells in oil-rich Unity State.

The United States, which played a major role in South Sudan's birth as an independent state, has a special responsibility to mediate a political solution. In a message last week, Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser and an Africa expert who has long worked on issues connected to Sudan, urged leaders on all sides to renounce violence and engage in peaceful dialogue. She also warned that if Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar insist on using force and mass violence, "the United States will have no choice but to withdraw our traditional, robust support."

On Monday, South Sudan's government threatened a major offensive to retake strategic towns seized by the rebels. But Donald Booth, the special United States envoy, met with Mr. Kiir, and afterward he said that Mr. Kiir was ready to begin talks to end the crisis. The fighting has already spread to half the country's 10 states.

The United States, European partners, and leaders of Kenya and Ethiopia who arrived in the capital of Juba on Thursday should be pressing for negotiations and make clear that South Sudan's leaders will face sanctions if they drag their fragile country into another senseless war.

Sudan and South Sudan fought a civil war that killed more than two million people before a peace deal was reached in 2005. It is unfathomable that having achieved independence from Khartoum, Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar would again risk their country's future by waging a conflict in which all sides will surely lose.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Sidney Awards, Part 1

The highly prestigious Sidney Awards go out to some of the best magazine essays of the year. This year, many of these essays probed the intersection between science and the humanities. Links to all can be found on the online edition of this column.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

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For example, over the summer and fall, two intellectual heavyweights, Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier, went toe-to-toe in The New Republic over the proper role of science in modern thought. Pinker took the expansive view, arguing that, despite what some blinkered humanities professors argue, science gives us insight into nearly everything. For example, Pinker argues that science has demonstrated that "the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions and cultures — their theories of the origins of life, humans and societies — are factually mistaken."

Instead, science has given us a different value system: "The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces."

Wieseltier counters that few believers take Scripture literally. They interpret. Meanwhile, science simply can't explain many of the most important things. Imagine a scientific explanation of a beautiful painting, based, say, on a chemical analysis of the paint. "Such an analysis will explain everything except what most needs explaining: the quality of beauty that is the reason for our contemplation of the painting." The scientists deny the differences between the realms of human existence and simplify reality by imposing their methods even where they can't apply.

Caitrin Nicol had an absorbing essay in The New Atlantis called "Do Elephants Have Souls?" Nicol quotes testimony from those who study elephant behavior. Here's one elephant greeting a 51-year-old newcomer to her sanctuary:

"Everyone watched in joy and amazement as Tarra and Shirley intertwined trunks and made 'purring' noises at each other. Shirley very deliberately showed Tarra each injury she had sustained at the circus, and Tarra then gently moved her trunk over each injured part."

Nicol not only asks whether this behavior suggests that elephants do have souls, she also illuminates what a soul is. The word is hard to define for many these days, but, Nicol notes, "when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved."

Larissa MacFarquhar had a brilliant profile in The New Yorker of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist who hanged himself early this year.

Swartz lived much of his life outside the normal structures. He was too brilliant for his high school, so his parents let him drop out and take college courses or study on his own. He thought the students at Stanford were shallow, so he didn't go back after his freshman year.

He began writing big books or starting great projects, but he usually didn't finish them. He had dreams of saving the world, but fuzzier notions of the specific avenues by which he might do it.

On the one hand, he seems to have been the victim of the formless freedom of the Internet life. On the other, he did have intellectual daring and a fierce independence. MacFarquhar tells the story as befits the subject, with email and text-message-type comments from Swartz and his friends propelling the piece along. "Even among my closest friends, I still feel like something of an imposition," Swartz wrote, "and ... the slightest hint that I'm correct sends me scurrying back into my hole."

Don Peck looked at how companies assess potential hires in an essay in The Atlantic called "They're Watching You at Work."

Peck demonstrates something that most of us already sense: that job interviews are a lousy way to evaluate potential hires. Interviewers at big banks, law firms and consultancies tend to prefer people with the same leisure interests — golf, squash, whatever. In one study at Xerox, previous work experience had no bearing on future productivity.

Now researchers are using data to try again to make a science out of hiring. They watch how potential hires play computer games to see who is good at task-switching, who possesses the magical combination: a strict work ethic but a loose capacity for "mind wandering." Peck concludes that this greater reliance on cognitive patterns and game playing may have an egalitarian effect. It won't matter if you went to Harvard or Yale. The new analytics sometimes lead to employees who didn't even go to college. The question is do these analytics reliably predict behavior? Is the study of human behavior essentially like the study of nonhuman natural behavior — or is there a ghost in the machine?

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