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"The helpless, seemingly clueless infant staring up at you from his crib, limbs flailing, drool oozing, has a lot more going on inside his head than you ever imagined. A wealth of new research is leading pediatricians and child psychologists to rethink their long-held beliefs about the emotional and intellectual abilities of even very young babies. In 1890, psychologist William James famously described an infant's view of the world as "one great blooming, buzzing confusion." It was a notion that held for nearly a century: infants were simple-minded creatures who merely mimicked those around them and grasped only the most basic emotions-happy, sad, angry. Science is now giving us a much different picture of what goes on inside their hearts and heads. Long before they form their first words or attempt the feat of sitting up, they are already mastering complex emotions-jealousy, empathy, frustration-that were once thought to be learned much later in toddlerhood. They are also far more sophisticated intellectually than we once believed. Babies as young as 4 months have advanced powers of deduction and an ability to decipher intricate patterns. They have a strikingly nuanced visual palette, which enables them to notice small differences, especially in faces, that adults and older children lose the ability to see. Until a baby is 3 months old, he can recognize a scrambled photograph of his mother just as quickly as a photo in which everything is in the right place. And big brothers and sisters beware: your sib has a long memory-and she can hold a grudge."

"The behavioral revolution in economics and psychology has successfully identified and named close to three dozen biases (my favorite behavioral folk song defines them in verse). I had thought that these biases transcended issues of culture. Indeed, both neoclassical and behavioral economists were united in a belief that cultural variables were of secondary importance when it came to the deep drivers of behavior. But a series of experiments now has me thinking that the underlying heuristics are less universal."

"Grisha Perelman, where are you? Three years ago, a Russian mathematician by the name of Grigory Perelman, a k a Grisha, in St. Petersburg, announced that he had solved a famous and intractable mathematical problem, known as the Poincaré conjecture, about the nature of space. After posting a few short papers on the Internet and making a whirlwind lecture tour of the United States, Dr. Perelman disappeared back into the Russian woods in the spring of 2003, leaving the world's mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide if he was right. Now they say they have finished his work, and the evidence is circulating among scholars in the form of three book-length papers with about 1,000 pages of dense mathematics and prose between them. As a result there is a growing feeling, a cautious optimism that they have finally achieved a landmark not just of mathematics, but of human thought."

"HERE IS A mathematician's nightmare I heard in the 1980s when that irritating, unconforming, self-regarding provocateur Benoît Mandelbrot was suddenly famous - fractals, fractals everywhere. The mathematician dreamed that Mandelbrot died, and God spoke: "You know, there really was something to that Mandelbrot." Sure enough. Mandelbrot created nothing less than a new geometry, to stand side by side with Euclid's - a geometry to mirror not the ideal forms of thought but the real complexity of nature. He was a mathematician who was never welcomed into the fraternity ("Fortress Mathematics," he said, where "the highest ambition is to wall off the windows and preserve only one door"), and he pretended that was fine with him. When Yale first hired him to teach, it was in engineering and applied science; for most of his career he was supported at I.B.M.'s Westchester research lab. He called himself a "nomad by choice." He considered himself an experienced refugee: born to a Jewish family in Warsaw in 1924, he immigrated to Paris ahead of the Nazis, then fled farther and farther into the French countryside."

"The 21-year-old woman was carefully trained not to flirt with anyone who came into the laboratory over the course of several months. She kept eye contact and conversation to a minimum. She never used makeup or perfume, kept her hair in a simple ponytail, and always wore jeans and a plain T-shirt. Each of the young men thought she was simply a fellow student at Florida State University participating in the experiment, which ostensibly consisted of her and the man assembling a puzzle of Lego blocks. But the real experiment came later, when each man rated her attractiveness. Previous research had shown that a woman at the fertile stage of her menstrual cycle seems more attractive, and that same effect was observed here - but only when this woman was rated by a man who wasn't already involved with someone else. The other guys, the ones in romantic relationships, rated her as significantly less attractive when she was at the peak stage of fertility, presumably because at some level they sensed she then posed the greatest threat to their long-term relationships. To avoid being enticed to stray, they apparently told themselves she wasn't all that hot anyway. This experiment was part of a new trend in evolutionary psychology to study "relationship maintenance." Earlier research emphasized how evolution primed us to meet and mate: how men and women choose partners by looking for cues like facial symmetry, body shape, social status and resources. "

"IT has been more than three years since the beginning of the Wall Street financial crisis, yet we continue to hear about new evidence of glaring errors and widespread misdoings. Even the smartest minds in finance are left scratching their heads: how did we not catch any of this sooner? When I hear this refrain, I am reminded of Boris Goldovsky. Goldovsky, who died in 2001, was a legend in opera circles, best remembered for his commentary during the Saturday matinee radio broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera. But he was also a piano teacher. And it is as a teacher that he made a lasting - albeit unintentional - contribution to our understanding of why seemingly obvious errors go undetected for so long. One day, a student of his was practicing a piece by Brahms when Goldovsky heard something wrong. He stopped her and told her to fix her mistake. The student looked confused; she said she had played the notes as they were written. Goldovsky looked at the music and, to his surprise, the girl had indeed played the printed notes correctly - but there was an apparent misprint in the music. At first, the student and the teacher thought this misprint was confined to their edition of the sheet music alone. But further checking revealed that all other editions contained the same incorrect note. Why, wondered Goldovsky, had no one - the composer, the publisher, the proofreader, scores of accomplished pianists - noticed the error? How could so many experts have missed something that was so obvious to a novice? This paradox intrigued Goldovsky. So over the years he gave the piece to a number of musicians who were skilled sight readers of music - which is to say they had the ability to play from a printed score for the first time without practicing. He told them there was a misprint somewhere in the score, and asked them to find it. He allowed them to play the piece as many times as they liked and in any way that they liked. But not one musician ever found the err

"After retiring from truck driving in 1987, Teri Horton devoted much of her time to bargain hunting around the Los Angeles area. Sometimes the bargains were discovered on Salvation Army shelves and sometimes, she willingly admits, at the bottom of Dumpsters. Even the most stubborn deal scrounger probably would have been satisfied with the rate of return recently offered to her for a curiosity she snagged for $5 in a San Bernardino thrift shop in the early 1990s. A buyer, said to be from Saudi Arabia, was willing to pay $9 million for it, just under an 180 million percent increase on her original investment. Ms. Horton, a sandpaper-voiced woman with a hard-shell perm who lives in a mobile home in Costa Mesa and depends on her Social Security checks, turned him down without a second thought. Ms. Horton's find is not exactly the kind that gets pulled from a steamer trunk on the "Antiques Roadshow." It is a dinner-table-size painting, crosshatched in the unmistakable drippy, streaky, swirly style that made Jackson Pollock one of the most famous artists of the last century. Ms. Horton had never heard of Pollock before buying the painting, but when an art teacher saw it and told her that it might be his work (and that it could fetch untold millions if it were), she launched herself on a single-minded post-retirement career - enlisting, along the way, a forensic expert and a once-powerful art dealer - to have her painting acknowledged as authentic by scholars and the art market."

"At one point in "The Wizard Of Oz," Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: "Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?" Dorothy is abashed and she says, "Oh, dear - I keep forgetting I'm not in Kansas," by which she means she's now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on. All this seems obvious, but what the tree's question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. I thought of this scene on the last day of my jurisprudence course when we came to the chapter on animal rights and the rights of objects . The question of the day was posed by Christopher Stone's landmark article "Should Trees Have Standing? - Toward Legal Rights For Natural Objects" (1972), and was answered, it would seem, in Genesis 1:26, when God gave man "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." The dominion of man over animals and nature is established theologically, and it is established again in the modern period by classical liberalism's privileging of individual rights exercised by beings endowed (by either God or nature) with the capacity of choice. From Locke to Mill to Berlin to Rawls, the centrality of the

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

"While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages - far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city's public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York's most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.\n\n"It is the capital of language density in the world," said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "We're sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years." "

"Many years later, Yarbrough met with a team of psychologists who were conducting training sessions for law enforcement. They sat beside him in a darkened room and showed him a series of videotapes of people who were either lying or telling the truth. He had to say who was doing what. One tape showed people talking about their views on the death penalty and on smoking in public. Another featured a series of nurses who were all talking about a nature film they were supposedly watching, even though some of them were actually watching grisly documentary footage about burn victims and amputees. It may sound as if the tests should have been easy, because we all think we can tell whether someone is lying. But these were not the obvious fibs of a child, or the prevarications of people whose habits and tendencies we know well. These were strangers who were motivated to deceive, and the task of spotting the liars turns out to be fantastically difficult. There is just too much information--words, intonation, gestures, eyes, mouth--and it is impossible to know how the various cues should be weighted, or how to put them all together, and in any case it's all happening so quickly that you can't even follow what you think you ought to follow. The tests have been given to policemen, customs officers, judges, trial lawyers, and psychotherapists, as well as to officers from the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the D.E.A., and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms-- people one would have thought would be good at spotting lies. On average, they score fifty per cent, which is to say that they would have done just as well if they hadn't watched the tapes at all and just guessed. But every now and again-- roughly one time in a thousand--someone scores off the charts. A Texas Ranger named David Maxwell did extremely well, for example, as did an ex-A.T.F. agent named J.J. Newberry, a few therapists, an arbitrator, a vice cop-- and John Yarbrough, which suggests that what happened in Willowbrook

"Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world. An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a "she") becomes a "he" once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has."

"Does It Matter Why He Did It? January 14, 2011 There's been no evidence to link today's toxic political environment with Jared Loughner's decision to use his gun last weekend. But the question persists: what has the aggressive rhetoric - peddled by mainstream candidates and media outlets and not just militant fringe groups - done to our society? The New Yorker's George Packer says the particular motivations for Loughner's rampage aren't the point."

"Political Rhetoric in the Wake of the Tucson Shooting January 14, 2011 After the shooting in Tucson last weekend, pundits across the political spectrum took a renewed look at the hyperbolic and oftentimes violent rhetoric that marks our modern political discourse. Brooke looks at the way the media responded to this tragedy."