Sublime

Kahneman et al. presented 867 jury-eligible subjects with descriptions of legal cases (e.g., a child whose clothes caught on fire) and asked them to either Rate the outrageousness of the defendant’s actions, on a bounded scale, Rate the degree to which the defendant should be punished, on a bounded scale, or Assign a dollar value to punitive

This idea first appeared on the scene decades ago, when it was discovered that cutting down on salt can lower the blood pressure. In truth, the effect is vanishingly small. Indeed, on an individual level it is virtually unmeasurable. For most people the effect is around two to three mmHg, absolute max.

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work—a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which

The important task for students of economic fairness is not to identify ideal behavior but to find the line that separates acceptable conduct from actions that invite opprobrium and punishment.

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls exposes them to

TALKING IDENTITY Until the middle of the twentieth century, no one who was asked about a person’s identity would have mentioned race, sex, class, nationality, region, or religion. When George Eliot writes in Middlemarch that Rosamond “was almost losing the sense of her identity,” it’s because Rosamond is faced with profoundly new experiences when

what happened in Spain as fiber-optic cables were laid and high-speed internet came to different regions at different times? A 2022 study analyzed “the effect of access to high-speed Internet on hospital discharge diagnoses of behavioral and mental health cases among adolescents.” The conclusion: We find a positive and significant impact on girls

It took only a couple of weeks of working for Sam before Caroline Ellison called her mother and sobbed into the phone that she’d just made the biggest mistake of her life. She’d first met Sam at Jane Street, in the summer before her senior year at Stanford, after he’d been assigned to teach her class of interns how to trade. “I was kind of, like,