Philipp Sadowski (Duke) and David Dillenberger (Penn): Ashamed to Be Selfish. Economic researchers are uncovering the chemical triggers in our brains that spark feelings of trust — and using their findings to better understand how markets work. Is it possible to save the millions of people who die from TB? Al-Qaida and the fragmented global Islamic militancy: That Roshonara Choudhry was labelled al-Qaida shows how resilient the notion of a single terrorist organisation has proved. Some may say it as a joke, others might find it offensive, but it turns out there’s some truth to the idea that people of other races “all look alike”. In the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, a giant has lived quietly for the past 80,000 years ago: The Trembling Giant, or Pando, is a enormous grove of quaking aspens that takes the “forest as a single organism” metaphor and literalizes it — the grove really is a single organism. The case against evidence: From fingerprints to high-tech CSI, forensic science plays a much smaller role than you would think. Secession and the city: It's in Albany's economic and political interests to keep New York City happy, then, so why the hell don't they? The Critic as Radical: George Scialabba on how T.S. Eliot’s conservatism was nearly as revolutionary as his poetry. Talks hosted by Zocalo draw a mostly but not exclusively young, electronically connected following; as older forums fall by the wayside, these events feed a growing hunger. From NYRB, how political was Picasso? John Richardson investigates. Slate's Jacob Weisberg was a Web pioneer, but he doesn’t much care for what works on the Web now — can Slate recover? (and a response) John Horgan on how Margaret Mead's war theory kicks butt of neo-Darwinian and Malthusian models.
