Being pregnant was a lot like being a child again. There was always someone telling you what to do.

The most active period of the witchcraft trials coincides with a period of lower than average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age"...In a time period when the reasons for changes in weather were largely a mystery, people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns. 'Witches' became target for blame because there was an existing cultural framework that both allowed their persecution and suggested that they could control the weather.

There is some risk to increase birth defects if you do a lot of outdoor gardening when you are pregnant. That can increase rates of toxoplasmosis.

Economists actually disagree about whether there are significant economic returns from attending an elite college versus a less-selective one.

Economics works great for planning your life when you don't have a work passion, since we tend to assume that your job delivers only money and you trade off job hours with leisure hours. If you think your job will just be a job, pick one that pays well per hour and leaves you some time off, even if the activity of the job is boring.

One of the big take-aways from a lot of economic theory is that people should engage in consumption smoothing.

As people do a task, they improve at it.