Author Archives: Jonathan Pfeiffer

Seed goes lab-goggle-eyed for Obama

I just called out the Seed editors over on Thick Culture.

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Thimphu recruits graduate students

On Thursday, the tiny state of Bhutan rose abruptly to the center of my attention. I walked into the Orfalea Center for a weekly seminar and was met by Gyaltshen Penjor, the understated, highly proficient envoy of Bhutan’s young Dragon King. As a result of the encounter, I am now considering a 2009 internship in [...]

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Fire Eagle: Trend or fad?

Kevin O’Connor’s advice on small business innovation is part of my assigned reading in school this Fall. He advises, not surprisingly, that new technologies and new markets are crucial to startup success. He cautions, however, that distinguishing between trends and fads is extremely hard. He suggests (in Chapter Three) that infrastructure is a crucial limiting [...]

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Personality, politics, and placement

José Marichal has described on his blog the challenging experience of having lived in the Deep South, New England, the American West, and Los Angeles, and why it all makes him empathic toward Barack Obama. He repeated Renee Cramer’s and Gloria Anzaldúa’s use of the word, “borderlands”.
The great strength of living in the bordelands [sic] [...]

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Trying to cram it all into the global

Last week, I resumed my graduate coursework in global and international studies. I was sitting in class today, thinking to myself: Every time, yet again, I hear the term, “global relief organization”, I might start to lose a little bit of hair. And then my sister showed me a cool course at Penn State on [...]

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Educate not only to compete

One of my intertube buddies in Tasmania prompted me to do a brief brain dump on national competitiveness and education.
Many countries around the world — United States and Australia included — are worried about their “competitiveness”. They worry about the abilities and inclinations of their students to produce value. We are often told that properly [...]

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The moral imperative of happiness

This Summer, New York University researchers Jaime Napier and John Tost suggested that people on the Left are generally not as happy as their counterparts on the Right. Ewen Callaway explains:
The recent surge in home foreclosures, for instance, is due to poor economic choices on the part of borrowers, a conservative might think. Liberals, on [...]

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From origins to possibilities

There are certain books that have contributed to who I am. Here is my mentally and editorially filtered list. What other books do you think I should read?

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Will oil prices boost design diversity?

The world, it seemed, was getting flatter and flatter. Or was it spikier? In any case, oil was cheap, and the global economy was a time-crunching, electron-beeping, carbon-smoking, border-integrating network of trade and finance. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the world wide web connected the Central Asias and Romanias to the North Americas [...]

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