Spoiler alert! "New research by psychologists Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt shows that people enjoy stories more when they already know the ending." Hollie Nyseth at Citings & Sightings.
Will Wilkinson has a new blog: It’s at Big Think and it’s called The Moral Sciences Club.
Stephanie Trigg has a new bike: "My bike is a thing of beauty," writes Stephanie , "sleek and silvery, but with lovely old-school touches of leather and wood."
The Second-Hand Persian Cat: Mr Teddington Blush Senior "has begun to show the horrific ravages of age on an almost spectacular scale."
Who is my stranger? Even on the left most people believe we have stronger obligations towards our fellow citizens than we have towards outsiders. But why does the nation state mark the boundary that divides ‘us’ from ‘them’? At Overcoming Bias Robin Hanson argues that libertarians also accept stronger obligations towards insiders. They just draw the boundary in a different place.
Australia’s changing labour market: "In the past year 101,500 extra jobs have been found for women, only 38,900 for men", writes Peter Martin.
The Internet is a scary place to be a feminist: And it’s not just the misogynistic commenters. According to Blue Milk: "your feminism probably naturally evolves but the Internet records everything. Take a position on something and you can never let that go, even when you change your mind years later."
Is China’s imminent collapse imminent? John Quiggin isn’t sure. In an article titled ‘China’s imminent collapse‘ he argues that "authoritarian governments may be much more fragile than they appear." A sudden slowdown in economic growth could see China’s oligarchic regime suddenly breakdown but there’s know way of telling how and when that might happen. Quiggin didn’t write the headline.
Is Quiggers a regular columnist for a journal founded by the father of neoconservatism now? :-)
The answer is more in the word ‘nation’ than in the word ‘state’.