fiefoe

"Rational Irrationality" / John Cassidy

John Maynard Keynes... in “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” pointed to the inconvenient fact that “there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.” Whatever the asset class may be—stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities—the market will seize up if everybody tries to sell at the same time.
“It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest,” Keynes explained. “We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be."

Anthony Lane: 'thicken the hint'

"Brain Drain" / James Wood

As Pushkin complained about Byron, do his conspirators have to do everything in a conspiratorial manner?
Powers is never more repetitive than when he is describing love or lust as a species of determinism. {The same complaint I would have lodged with Christos H. Papadimitriou's novel, "Turing". }

The New Yorker, 2009-10-05