Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Dan Baum and The New Yorker

    Dan Baum (a staff writer for The New Yorker ’til his firing in 2007) has been revealing details about his tenure on his Twitter account. In addition to discussing some day-to-day workings of The New Yorker, he’s also provided some great advice for aspiring writers. Baum has compiled his tweets in a much more readable format on his…

  • Superstition and Irrationality

    I’d like to class myself as a fairly rational being, but we all have our transgressions, right? So are we all maybe a bit superstitious? To answer this, Richard Wiseman offers this common thought experiment from Bruce Hood’s new book, Supersense: Imagine that you only have two objects in your house: 1) A £10 watch that was given to you by…

  • Ending Foreign Aid to Africa

    Foreign aid to Africa has turned the continent into a ‘giant welfare state’ and is one of the direct causes for the rise in poverty rates from 11% to 66% in recent times. This is according to African author and economist Dambisa Moyo as she adds her voice to the growing group of learned economists…

  • Taming White House Trolls

    When the Obama administration embraced blogging, sans commenting, on the White House website there were a number of detractors saying that Obama had retreated from his campaign promise of providing a site enabling public discussions. The reasons why are fairly obvious, but Clive Thompson looks at how the WhiteHouse.gov blog could enable commenting and successfully/safely control trolls (the…

  • The Genetic Gap

    I can’t write a better leading sentence than David already has: “In an article encouraging us not to use genetic tendencies for racist ends, William Saletan offers a possible genetic answer [to the question, Why are there so many black athletes?]” One example is the RR variant of ACTN3, a gene that affects fast generation of muscular…

  • Deliberate Practice Breeds Genius

    I initially thought that this was just going to be another superfluous variation on the 10,000 hours theme (from Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, Outliers). OK, so while it actually is that, David Brooks’ look at how to forge modern creative genius is still fairly interesting. Coyle describes a tennis academy in Russia where they enact rallies without a…

  • Psychology of Sales

    Retailers aren’t in sales; they’re “in the perception business”, says Jonah Lehrer while discussing how we perceive goods of varying prices, especially discounted goods. Consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more…

  • Basic Laws of Human Stupidity

    Tongue-in-cheek, but parts of this ring true: the basic laws of human stupidity. Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation. The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or…

  • Living Abroad Enhances Creativity

    Could living abroad, (or more specifically, adapting to a foreign culture) enhance creativity? Researchers conducting a series of novel and interesting tests (including the candle box functional fixedness test) are starting to suggest so. Across these three studies, the association between foreign living and creativity held even after controlling for personality variables. In other words…

  • The Extinction of the Dinosaurs

    Was the Chicxulub impact really the K–T extinction event that caused the extinction of (non-avian) dinosaurs? Well… probably, yes. However, if you don’t know the background you can do a lot worse than Ethan Siegel’s comprehensive yet succinct account of what wiped out the dinosaurs. via Seed