Richard Thaler, a behavioural economist who also has a New York Times column, looked at 26 occasions on which Swoopo had simply auctioned $1,000 cheques. The average revenue was $2,452
The path of least resistance is to just keep borrowing until the markets start reacting. And I'm afraid that that may be what happens. The problem then is that the debts are so big, the interest payments are so large, it starts cannibalizing everything else, and our children are the ones who end up paying for this
If the pace of increase in life expectancy in developed countries over the past two centuries continues through the 21st century, most babies born since 2000 in France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USA, Canada, Japan, and other countries with long life expectancies will celebrate their 100th birthdays
I had the idea a while ago of making my bid for literary greatness by simply getting a Mills & Boon romance novel from a railway station bookshop and plagiarising it more or less word for word, except that I would cunningly transpose the setting to a concentration camp
I appreciate that some readers do not want to see these images and I am sorry if they suffer trauma from it. But it is nothing like the trauma that the parents of that child felt, whose death was partly funded by US military aid. If you do not want to see these graphic images, please stop reading the Dish
Non-fiction has long been treated as the lutefisk on the literary menu, unlikely to be the special of the day. The genre emits a whiff of the déclassé, served (especially in literature departments) with a garnish of condescension. The problem starts with the word: Like "childless" (why not "child-free"?), "non-fiction" packs a lot of social judgment
An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible has to oversee the clean-up process
One of the basic rules of diplomacy is that American presidents never publicly insist on something they aren’t sure of getting
We ultimately found little if any evidence that courtesy increased store sales. The main finding was that clerks in stores with more sales were actually less courteous. Apparently, the crowding and long lines in busy stores make clerks and customers grouchy
Some strains of Buddhism hold that if you're going to eat an animal, it's morally preferable to kill one really large animal rather than many smaller ones