Draw a picture of the sun. If you’re like us, you probably have to fight the urge to add a smiley face to it. That’s a cognitive leftover from our childhood: young children almost always add smiley faces to sun drawings, and believe that the sun benignly follows them around. It turns out that this same tendency, to assign agency to patterns and objects beyond our control, also drives conspiracy theorizing among adults.
Given that we’re already spending the GNP of a small nation on weddings, why not include a little Internet video to share those Big Days with the world? The Wall Street Journal reports that wedding Web sites are a bigger phenomenon than ever, with couples sharing details of their nuptials in blogs, webcasts and online videos. Consumerist offers a conspiracy-busting . . .
We couldn’t help but notice that the New York Times has devoted an awful lot of column inches recently to the brutal process that teens face when applying to the country’s most prestigious colleges. Looks like we weren’t the only ones who noticed: To the Editor: I have noticed several articles in The Times on how difficult it is to . . .
Morgan Reynolds was chief economist for the Department of Labor in the first term of the George W. Bush administration. He was in the economics department at Texas A&M (now retired), and he has published in the top economics journals like JPE, AER, and QJE. Now he’s traveling a slightly different road: From a United Press International report in the . . .