People at CDC [Centers for Disease Control] who cut their teeth on diseases over the last 10 years have started to think of crime as another disease, and using some of these same concepts. It was something that was in the air in that world, but it was time to bust it out and apply it to any number of different social epidemics.

What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.

Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls "practical intelligence." To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like "knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.