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Every modern presidential election is at least in part defined by the cool new media breakthrough of its moment.

In 2000, there was email, and by golly was that a big change from the fax. The campaigns could get their messages in front of print and cable news reporters — who could still dominate the campaign narrative — at will,

Then 2008: Facebook made it that much easier for campaigns to reach millions of people directly,

Charles Koch is known for being CEO of industrial giant Koch Industries and a chief financier of the massive conservative political operation he runs with his brother David. In recent years, student activists and investigative journalists have exposed another of Koch’s hats: mega-donor to hundreds of colleges and universities, often funding free-market-focused academic centers housed at public and private schools alike. One Koch-funded program is advocating cutthroat economics to grade school students, even sacrificing lives for profits.

From 2005 to 2014, the Charles Koch Foundation doled out nearly $108 million to colleges and universities. The school that has accepted the second highest total from the Charles Koch Foundation from 2005 to 2014 is Florida State University, whose economics department entered into a 2008 agreement that gave the foundation a say in its curriculum and hiring decisions, as Dave Levinthal of the Center for Public Integrity reported. One part of the 2008 agreement, which proposed a $6.6 million budget to be funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and unnamed “Donor Partners,” established a “Program for Excellence in Economic Education” within the Gus A. Stavros Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Economic Education, part of the economics department. Annual reports confirm these funding arrangements

"Magna Cortica is the argument that we need to have a guidebook for both the design spec and ethical rules around the increasing power and diversity of cognitive augmentation," said IFTF distinguished fellow, Jamais Cascio. "There are a lot of pharmaceutical and digital tools that have been able to boost our ability to think. Adderall, Provigil, and extra-cortical technologies."

Back in 2008, 20 percent of scientists reported using brain-enhancing drugs. And I spoke with dozens of readers who had complex regimens, including, for example, a researcher at the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. "We aren't the teen clubbers popping uppers to get through a hard day running a cash register after binge drinking," the researcher told me. "We are responsible humans." Responsible humans trying to get an edge in incredibly competitive and cognitively demanding fields. 

part of Google Glass's divisiveness stems from its prospective ability to enhance one's social awareness or provide contextual help in conversations; the company Social Radar has already released an app for Glass that shows social network information for people who are in the same location as you are. A regular app called MindMeld listens to conference calls and provides helpful links based on what the software hears you talking about.

Based primarily on national telephone surveys of 1,648 U.S. adults in 2008 and 1,721 in 2006, the book also draws from more than 200 in-depth interviews that, among other things, asked people to respond to a dozen evocative images

• Punishing?

"one clear finding is that the USA — where images of a personal God engaged in our lives dominate — is an outlier in the world of technologically advanced nations such as (those in) Europe." There, the view is almost entirely one of a Big Bang sort of God who launched creation and left it spinning rather than a God who has a direct influence on daily events.

THROUGHOUT the debt-ceiling debacle, poll after poll has shown that Americans want politicians in Washington to compromise.

why is compromise so hard to achieve?

“Americans are self-segregating,” said Bill Bishop, author of “The Big Sort,” a 2008 book that examined, in the words of its subtitle, “why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart.”

Facebook is not just any corporation. It reached trillion-dollar status in a single decade by applying the logic of what I call surveillance capitalism — an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data

Facebook and other leading surveillance capitalist corporations now control information flows and communication infrastructures across the world.

These infrastructures are critical to the possibility of a democratic society, yet our democracies have allowed these companies to own, operate and mediate our information spaces unconstrained by public law.

Mr. Derman is perhaps a bit too harsh when he describes EMM—the so-called Efficient Market Model. EMM does not, as he claims, imply that prices are always correct and that price always equals value. Prices are always wrong. What EMM says is that we can never be sure if prices are too high or too low.

The Efficient Market Model does not suggest that any particular model of valuation—such as the Capital Asset Pricing Model—fully accounts for risk and uncertainty or that we should rely on it to predict security returns. EMM does not, as Mr. Derman says, "stubbornly assume that all uncertainty about the future is quantifiable." The basic lesson of EMM is that it is very difficult—well nigh impossible—to beat the market consistently.

Mr. Derman gives an eloquent description of James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory in a chapter titled "The Sublime." He writes: "The electromagnetic field is not like Maxwell's equations; it is Maxwell's equations."

There is no mystery about Barack Obama’s greatest presidential achievement: He stopped the Great Recession from becoming the second Great Depression. True, he had plenty of help, including from his predecessor, George W. Bush, and from the top officials at the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve. But if Obama had made one wrong step, what was a crushing economic slump could have become something much worse.

It is Obama’s unfortunate fate that the high-water mark of his presidency occurred in the first months, when the world flirted with financial calamity. The prospect of another Great Depression — a long period of worsening economic decline — was not far-fetched.

In the first quarter of 2009, as Obama was moving into the White House, monthly job losses averaged 772,000. The ultimate decline in employment was 8.7 million jobs, or 6.3 percent. Housing prices and stock values were collapsing. From their peak in February 2007 to their low point, housing prices dropped 26 percent. Millions of homeowners were “underwater” — their houses were worth less than the mortgages on them. Stock prices fell roughly by half from August 2007 to March 2009.

Until recently, the overwhelming consensus in psychology was that intelligence was essentially a fixed trait. But in 2008, an article by a group of researchers led by Susanne Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl challenged this view and renewed many psychologists’ enthusiasm about the possibility that intelligence was trainable — with precisely the kind of tasks that are now popular as games.

it’s important to explain why we’re not sold on the idea.

There have been many attempts to demonstrate large, lasting gains in intelligence through educational interventions, with few successes. When gains in intelligence have been achieved, they have been modest and the result of many years of effort.

Why is someone who is so good at making money so bad at talking about it?Mitt Romney is not the first presidential candidate who’s had trouble communicating with working-class voters: John Kerry famously enjoyed wind-surfing, and George Bush blamed a poor showing in a straw poll on the fact that many of his supporters were “at their daughter’s coming out party.”Veritable battalions of Kennedys and Roosevelts have dealt with the economic and cultural gaps between themselves and the voters over the years without much difficulty. Not so Barack Obama, whose attempt to commiserate with Iowa farmers in 2007 about crop prices by mentioning the cost of arugula at Whole Foods fell flat.

Romney’s reference last week to the fact that his wife “drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually” is not grounds in itself for a voter to oppose his candidacy. Neither was the $10,000 bet he offered to Rick Perry during a debate in December or the time he told a group of the unemployed in Florida that he was “also unemployed.”But his penchant for awkward references to his own wealth has underscored the suspicion that many voters have about his ability to understand their economic problems. His opponents in both parties  are gleefully highlighting these moments as a way to drive a wedge between Romney and the working class voters who have become an increasingly important part of the Republican Party base.

The current economic circumstances have undoubtedly exacerbated the problem for Romney. Had Obama initially sought the presidency during a primary season dominated by concerns about the domestic economy rather than war in Iraq, his explanation that small town voters “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” might have created an opportunity for Hillary Clinton or even the populist message of John Edwards.

These are hard times for economists. Their reputations are tarnished; their favorite doctrines are damaged. Among their most prominent thinkers, there is no consensus as to how — or whether — governments in advanced countries can improve lackluster recoveries.

economists at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a retrospective study of its economic forecasts. This qualifies as an act of bureaucratic courage, because the record was predictably dismal

Interestingly, one item not on the list is “too much austerity.” The OECD economists found that they generally hadn’t underestimated the effects of spending cuts and tax increases intended to shrink budget deficits in Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and elsewhere

The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50 years, most strikingly in the developing world, and that by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world.

n 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of antidepressant use in the United States rose by 400 percent between 1988 and 2008.

there is reason to believe that mental illness is indeed increasing around the world, if only because urbanization is increasing. By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities.

When I teach writing, I stress the immediacy of art to my students. Fiction, I tell them, plays out in the perpetual present, a story making itself anew each time we read or tell it. When we write about a work in the present tense, we focus on what it does, on the ways that it whispers and shouts as we listen to it. With the present tense, we acknowledge that the work is a thing in itself, a subject in the grammatical sense: It is one that acts, albeit one impelled to action by its encounter with the reader. In the process, we maintain the conceit that art has a degree of independent and objective reality, and that, therefore, it can be examined, argued about, and discussed.

By contrast, the past tense suggests a certain naiveté. Put simply, where the present tense lets us discuss art in its own terms, the past tense leaves us unwittingly talking about ourselves. With it, we implicitly tell a story about our experience of the work instead of the work itself, narrating the events it describes as if they had happened to us. The independent work of art dissolves here,

In a seminal 2008 New York Review of Books article, Nicholson Baker points out that Wikipedia has always been a subjective phenomenon, despite its protestations to the contrary. Intellectually ravenous, Baker writes that “it just feels good to find something there—even, or especially, when the article you find is a little clumsily written.” Tellingly, Baker himself often employs the past tense as he explains the site, implicitly describing his experience of it rather than the thing in itself. In the process, he suggests that Wikipedia, the defining monument of knowledge today, has as much to do with the ways we were—with the things we’ve felt, sensed, and done—as with the things we know.

Among economists more generally, a lot of the criticism seems to amount to the view that macroeconomics is bunk, and that we should stick to microeconomics, which is the real, solid stuff. As I’ll explain in a moment, that’s all wrong

in an important sense the past decade has been a huge validation for textbook macroeconomics; meanwhile, the exaltation of micro as the only “real” economics both gives microeconomics too much credit and is largely responsible for the ways macroeconomic theory has gone wrong.

Finally, many outsiders and some insiders have concluded from the crisis that economic theory in general is bunk, that we should take guidance from people immersed in the real world – say, business leaders — and/or concentrate on empirical results and skip the models

On the outsize role of the GSEs and other federal agencies in high-risk mortgages, figures compiled by former Fannie Mae Chief Credit Officer Edward Pinto show that as of mid-2008, more than 70% were accounted for by the federal government in one way or another, with nearly two-thirds of that held by Fannie and Freddie.

As has been documented, for example, in a forthcoming book on the GSEs called Guaranteed to Fail, there was a steady increase in affordable housing mandates imposed on these enterprises by Congress, one of several reasons why they were hardly like other capitalist enterprises, but tools and beneficiaries of government.

I asked Ferguson why Inside Job made such brief mention of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and even then without noting that they are government-sponsored enterprises, subject to special protection by the federal government—which their creditors clearly appreciated, given the unusually low interest rates their debt commanded.

The U.S. grew from a “backwoods country” to one of “greatest nations the world has ever known” thanks to science — but that pillar of America is eroding, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson warns.

Science deniers “rising to power” now create a “recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy,”

“People have lost the ability to judge what is true and what is not, what is reliable, what is not reliable,” he says in the above video, which he posted to Facebook Wednesday. “That’s not the country I remember growing up in. I don’t remember any other time where people were standing in denial of what science was.”

economics needs rethinking in the wake of a disastrous crisis, a crisis that was neither predicted nor prevented.

it’s important to realize that the enormous intellectual failure of recent years took place at several levels. Clearly, economics as a discipline went badly astray in the years — actually decades — leading up to the crisis. But the failings of economics were greatly aggravated by the sins of economists, who far too often let partisanship or personal self-aggrandizement trump their professionalism. Last but not least, economic policy makers systematically chose to hear only what they wanted to hear. And it is this multilevel failure — not the inadequacy of economics alone — that accounts for the terrible performance of Western economies since 2008.

Hardly anyone predicted the 2008 crisis, but that in itself is arguably excusable in a complicated world.

Elon Musk says his companies SpaceX and Tesla are both still alive only "by the skin of their teeth".The entrepreneur told an audience at the South by South West (SXSW) conference that both companies almost went bankrupt in 2008.

He said 2008 was an incredibly difficult year - SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket failed for the third time, and Tesla almost went bankrupt two days before Christmas.

Mr Musk also got divorced, and he said he had to borrow money from his friends to pay his rent.

In recent years, criticism has been levelled at economics for being insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. But a new study led by MIT scholars finds the field increasingly overlaps with the work of other disciplines, and, in a related development, has become more empirical and data-driven, while producing less work of pure theory.

In psychology journals, for instance, citations of economics papers have more than doubled since 2000. Public health papers now cite economics work twice as often as they did 10 years ago, and citations of economics research in fields from operations research to computer science have risen sharply as well.

As Angrist acknowledges, one impetus for the study was the wave of criticism the economics profession has faced over the last decade, after the banking crisis and the “Great Recession” of 2008-2009, which included the finance-sector crash of 2008. The paper’s title alludes to the film “Inside Job” — whose thesis holds that, as Angrist puts it, “economics scholarship as an academic enterprise was captured somehow by finance, and that academic economists should therefore be blamed for the Great Recession.”