Number of words: 320 We know that Earth’s magnetic North Pole doesn’t quite line up with the North Pole on a world map — it’s wandered, at a glacial pace, about 1,400 miles since its first discovery in 1831, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). What scientists didn’t expect, however, is that … Read more

Number of words: 1,784 It has been reported that the prime minister’s patience with the IAS is wearing thin. One of the reasons conjectured is that the efforts of the government do not seem to percolate down towards its intended recipients and hence it is vigorously pursuing the idea of taking more and more senior officers … Read more

Number of words: 392 People aren’t good at dealing with the uncertainties or missing information in a puzzle. Here’s a neat little example that’s been tested in psychological studies and widely discussed. You’ve got four cards on the table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other side. Naturally,you … Read more

Number of words: 168 You know, of course, that water holds up a fish that is placed in it. Well, here is a problem. Suppose we have a bucket which is partly full of water. We place the bucket on the scales and find that with the water in it, it weighs exactly 45 pounds. … Read more

Number of words: 229 Though Grant’s productivity depends on many factors, there’s one idea in particular that seems central to his method: the batching of hard but important intellectual work into long, uninterrupted stretches. Grant performs this batching at multiple levels. Within the year, he stacks his teaching into the fall semester, during which he … Read more

Number of words: 150 In a seminal 1981 paper, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked out the mathematics behind these “winner-take-all” markets. One of his key insights was to explicitly model talent—labeled, innocuously, with the variable q in his formulas—as a factor with “imperfect substitution,” which Rosen explains as follows: “Hearing a succession of mediocre singers … Read more

Number of words: 2,654 We are stealing nature from our children. Now, when I say this, I don’t mean that we are destroying nature that they will have wanted us to preserve, although that is unfortunately also the case. What I mean here is that we’ve started to define nature in a way that’s so purist and so strict that under … Read more

Number of words: 286 Under an older and today much weakend view of the nature of law, each such question had a “right” and a “wrong” answer; the “right law” was somehow there, to be discovered or found by the correct use of technical reasoning. Among some lawyers and among some other people, this is … Read more

Number of words: 458 Mostcapital offences are unbailable, or bail is set so high as to be absolutely inaccessible to any but the affluent. This means that in the capital case every kind of activity outside the jail – the marshalling of testimony, the verification of facts – must be carried on by somebody other … Read more

Number of words: 562 First it must be noted that what we are talking about is not whether the threat of punishment deters people from crime. The question, much more specific than that, is whether the threat of death is of significantly greater deterrent force than the threat of long imprisonment. How does this question … Read more