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It was during this time that he conceived what he calls his “Keplerian quest.” Three centuries earlier, Johannes Kepler had made sense of the seemingly irregular motions of the planets by a single geometrical insight: he posited that their orbits, instead of being circular as had been supposed since ancient times, took the form of an ellipse. As a teenager, Mandelbrot “came to worship” Kepler’s achievement and aspired to do something similar—to impose order on an inchoate area of science through a bold geometrical stroke.

.. To Mandelbrot, these two men were “made of stardust.” He served as postdoc to both: first to Wiener at MIT, and then to von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton—where he had a nightmarish experience. Delivering a lecture on the deep links between physics and linguistics, he watched as one after another of the famous figures in the audience nodded off and snored. When he finished, the renowned historian of mathematics Otto Neugebauer woke the sleepers by shouting, “I must protest! This is the worst lecture I ever heard!” Mandelbrot was by now paralyzed with fear, but happily a formidable pair came to his rescue: first Robert Oppenheimer, who flawlessly conveyed the intended gist of the lecture in one of his legendary “Oppie talks”; and then von Neumann, who did the same in one of his equally celebrated “Johnny talks.” The audience was transfixed, and the event ended in triumph.

.. The fractal model of financial markets that Mandelbrot went on to develop has never caught on with finance professors, who still by and large cling to the efficient market hypothesis. If Mandelbrot’s analysis is right, reliance on orthodox models is dangerous. And so it has proved, on more than one occasion. In the summer of 1998, for example, Long-Term Capital Management—a hedge fund founded by two economists who had won Nobel Prizes for their work in portfolio theory and staffed with twenty-five Ph.D.s—blew up and nearly took down the world’s banking system when an unforeseen Russian financial crisis foiled its models.

In other words, Keynes was saying economics has to do more than just tell us how the world works when the world works. It has to tell us how the world works when it doesn't -- and how to make it work again. An economist who only says our problems will eventually go away is no better than a doctor who says the same of illnesses. This is not a call to ignore the future, but rather to stop ignoring the present.

We are killed by the accumulation of our own normal neurotransmitter telling our own nerves to do the normal things they normally do, just in excess. One could draw an analogy to cancer.

According to one study, women in the arts and entertainment are more likely to keep their names; the authors hypothesized that their maiden names had already become "akin to a 'brand'."

.. Cokie Roberts's full name is actually Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Roberts. Cokie was just easier for her brother to pronounce.

From a series of films based on the book Marriage for Moderns by Henry A. Bowman comes "Choosing for Happiness," a dating how-to guide for young women in 1950, courtesy of the Prelinger Archive

.. In an era when the median marrying age for women was 19, this instructional film reminds us that, in the '50s, society still viewed college for women as merely a layover on the way down the aisle

South african classic. Clasico verbenero. The Queens are Emily Zwane from Brakpan, Thandi Radebe from Dube ( Soweto ), Beatrice Ngcobo from Durban, Thandi Nkosi from Emdeni ( Soweto ) and Caroline Kapentar from Bloemfontein. They are considered the best Mgqashiyo entertainers in Southern Africa.

Tolstoy's scathing attacks on the institution of property made it humiliating for him to be a landowner, and his constant exhortations in favor of sexual abstinence embarrassed his wife, especially when she found herself pregnant for the thirteenth time. (pp 171)

After a while, he let the scientist speak. And the scientist told them that there was a way to save coffee. Coffee’s effectiveness, the scientist said, was declining because of global warming. They weren’t sure why, but the connection was clear, and soon it would be too late. But if they acted now, they could arrest the rise in temperature and save coffee

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that almost five per cent of adults acknowledge nodding off at the wheel at least once during the previous month

.. Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, “Americans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.” They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their “first sleep” and rattled around—praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their “second sleep.”

.. Roenneberg advocates scheduling high-school classes to begin later in the day, and he cites studies showing that schools that delay the start of first period see performance, motivation, and attendance all increase. (A school district in Minnesota that switched to a later schedule found that the average S.A.T. scores for the top ten per cent of the class rose by more than two hundred points, a result that the head of the College Board called “truly flabbergasting.”)

In conversations with non-feminists—which are arguably the most important—using the word "feminism" rarely opens doors to deeper dialogue. Instead, it often acts as a barrier to the very ideas that word represents. This is a serious problem, one that I wish more feminists were talking candidly about.

Their entire argument rests on the word "can." The logic of "can" is that the digital future might be bright, but it also might not be. You can't argue with "can," because "can" doesn't commit. Yet, the nuance of "can" is one of hope and possibility: The digital future can be bright! With one word, they dismiss their own caveats without having to deny them.

As even Schmidt and Cohen acknowledge in parts, these are moral questions and ethical questions and political questions and possibly military questions. But they're definitely not technology questions. They're about when it's right or prudent to take a life, whatever the weapon of destruction. Technology doesn't help us answer these questions, no matter how heat-seeking, turbo-charged, or holographic it is. Technology doesn't solve the problems it itself poses.

During the recession, college graduates didn't lose many jobs, while everyone else did. But during the recovery, college grads have gained the most jobs, while everyone else mostly hasn't. Look at the green and purple lines again. People without any postsecondary education not only got hit hardest during the downturn, but have also gotten hit during the upturn. In other words, they have even lost jobs during the recovery.

This subversive approach — “indirect communication” was the term he used repeatedly in “Concluding Unscientific Postscript” — was a way of saying: “Here is a secret that I cannot tell you — in fact, to say it outright would ruin it. Yet even without saying it, I think you get the idea.” Perceptive readers did get the idea without being told explicitly what it was.

.. This technique is familiar today; it’s what we experience in public debate, more widely with every advance in communications technology. The best commercial and political advertisements demonstrate it. Political candidates know that speaking directly to voters, telling them precisely what they stand for, may only be asking for trouble and that there are more effective ways to broadcast their views. The “dog-whistling” of modern campaigns —seemingly innocuous language used by surrogates and press officers to spread unruly opinions — is a method that Johannes Climacus, the “author” of the “Postscript,” would recognize.

In the gap between technology and regulatory instruments, the Chinese people are finally able to hear some free words and to read some true facts that the government has not yet had time to block. The high-speed train accident, the Wukan anti-government protests, the Chen Guangcheng incident, and many other incidents and events all set off huge waves on the Internet before a ban was imposed.

.. You can't imagine how much wisdom and energy the Chinese people have to expend on their choice of words. On the Internet, people call Falun Gong "wheel". The year 1989 has become "the year before 1990" June 4 is now "May 35", tank is called "tractor".

The interview with a man who lost his testosterone continues. He explains that life without testosterone is life without desire—desire for everything: food, conversation, even TV. And he says life without desire is unexpectedly pleasant.

Cricket, boarding-house names reminiscent of Harry Potter’s Hogwarts and ancient and peculiar customs are among the hallmarks of Britain’s leading private schools. Now they can be found in Singapore and Kazakhstan. As the domestic market softens, some of the most famous names in British education are building far-flung outposts.

Mercy: that might be the singular benefit of repeating the sins of the previous generation.

Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

.. If not the usual suspects, what’s going on? It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school.

In a working paper, Michael Ross and a colleague, Erik Voeten of Georgetown University, argue that the regular global flow of petroleum, the biggest commodity in world trade, is also a powerful stabilizing force. Nations dislike depending on international oil, but they play nice and obey the rules because they don’t want to be cut off. By contrast, countries with plenty of energy reserves feel free to throw their weight around. They are “less likely than other states to sign major treaties or join intergovernmental organizations; and they often defy global norms—on human rights, the expropriation of foreign companies, and the financing of foreign terrorism or rebellions.” The implication is sobering: an energy-independent planet would be a world of fractious, autonomous actors, none beholden to the others, with even less cooperation than exists today.

I don’t think there is a particular point at which I can say I became depressed. My illness was insidious, gradual and inexorable. I had a preview of depression in high school, when I spent a couple of years wearing all black, rimming my eyes in kohl and sliding against the walls in the hallways, hoping that no one would notice me. But back then I didn’t think it was a very serious problem.