The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.

Paris Hilton, it turns out, is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy.

Photography is a kind of virtual reality, and it helps if you can create the illusion of being in an interesting world.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.