Humans have trouble with economics, as you may have noticed, and not just because economic circumstances sometimes cause them to starve. Humans seem to have an innate inability to pay attention to economic principles.

Never serve oysters in a month that has no paycheck in it.

Satan probably wouldn't have talked so big if God had been his wife.

Detroits industrial ruins are picturesque, like crumbling Rome in an 18th-century etching.

When Adam Smith was being incomprehensible, he didn't have the luxury of brief, snappy technical terms as a shorthand for incoherence.

Once we realized that there were these 25 invariable types - the class politician, the frigid popular girl, the kid who tags along behind the jocks - once we came up with these key characters in a cloud of marijuana, the whole thing just came together. One of the things I'm really proud of is how much of a high-school yearbook it is in its look, so much so that Hunter Publishing had the art director, David Kaestle, and I come for years to their annual convention and do a little talk on how not to do a yearbook.

Italy is not technically part of the Third World, but no one has told the Italians.