From Mute, dusting off the tedium and ash deposited by Hollywood's recent spate of catastrophe movies, Evan Calder Williams takes aim at their world-affirming pessimism and calls for some real apocalypse; and the future isn’t what it used to be: M. Beatrice Fazi dismisses conceptions of the future as linear effect of the present, instead embracing models of "atemporality" and untimeliness. Why programs fail: When one program after another fails again and again, and when the failures are not random but somehow always benefit the owning class, we have to ask, “How come?” From Minding the Campus, a look at how corrupted language moved from campus to the real world; and it is no wonder that many free-market think tank scholars must feel like they are trying to push boulder up a mountain; they are — the professors got there first and designed the obstacle course terrain. A review of A Sadly Troubled History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age by John C. Weaver. Jonathan Lee Riches seems determined to drag every star athlete, dead monarch and inanimate object into court — that’s if the zombies don’t get him first. Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently; this new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy and our own self-awareness. Can you really predict the success of a marriage in 15 minutes?: An excerpt from Laurie Abraham's The Husbands and Wives Club (and more and more). Seemingly odd couple make a proper pair: At first glance, Miss Manners and her daughter, Jacobina, an improv instructor, come across as opposites — gentle reader, you be the judge.
