Tag: war
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Twenty years from now, could veterans of Afghanistan be trading war stories over friendly dinners with ex-Taliban fighters? It sound inconceivable, but then, it always is—when the war is still on. Yet ex-soldiers in past wars have felt a bond with fellow-fighters, which they don't share with non ... Read More
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Whatever the facts of the crimes in this week's pair of institutional scandals (and it bears saying that trials in the Afghanistan "kill team" case are ongoing, while Jerry Sandusky hasn't yet been convicted of anything), the facts about the institutional responses by the Army and Penn State are ... Read More
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"We might ask ourselves," writes Noam Chomsky about the Bin Laden mission, "how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic." This seems wrongheaded to me, but I think it's worth considering why. Especially as ... Read More
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Ariel Levy's review in The New Yorker of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed repeats a common truism about marriage: That marriage ties originally were about lowering everyone's personal threat level. In ancient times, Levy writes, "A web of families connected through marriage produced a clan of people ... Read More
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Nations involved in World Wars I and II had a different ratio of male births to female than they had in peacetime, and the effect persisted for a few years after the wars had ended. It was a very slight tilt in favor of boys. The demographics suggest that for some reason men who fought in the ... Read More
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Some time in the early 1960s, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot was asked by a university librarian to give his advice about some dusty journals no one consulted—should they be thrown out? In one of these, an issue of General Systems Yearbook, a paper described how badly the smooth mathematical ... Read More
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Eastern Congo has been overrun with armed groups since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their ongoing war has killed more than 5 million people and caused millions more to suffer, as non-combatants have been displaced, impoverished, press-ganged, infected with diseases, mutilated and/or raped. These ... Read More
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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In A Shipwreck, Your Heart Is More Likely To Go On If You're Male