By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

Since the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland wants to remain a part of Great Britain, and since Ireland itself has shown little interest in reunification, the IRA's prospects for success through political channels have always been limited.

Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.

Framing effects can be very influential, and to the degree that you can think of a task as close rather than distant, you're more likely to actually get it done.

There are lots of people who believe there may be at least some genetic component to procrastination, and even if there isn't, it seems to be the case that procrastination habits are often set relatively early in life (that's certainly the case with me). But I also think that there's lots of evidence that external tools can help quite a bit in getting people to stop procrastinating.

Publishers, naturally, loathe used books and have developed strategies to depress the secondhand market. They bring out new, even more expensive editions of popular textbooks every three to four years, in a classic cycle of planned obsolescence.

Art collecting has traditionally been the domain of wealthy individuals in search of rewards beyond the purely financial.