Here’s the economic theory for us ordinary folk,” a dad said to daughter
about the way of the world before Tariffs got in the way.
How Things Work
Today it’s going to cost us $20
To live. Five for softball. Four for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, Rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there is chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From a fruit stand, and what coins
Are passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets to a movie in which laughter
is thrown into their faces.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.
Postscript: This is almost unbearably sweet in this crazy time.
Well, almost any sanity is now poignant because of its general loss.
It would probably cost a hundred bucks today “to live.” Maybe more.
But this is a human way in which we take care of each other. Isn’t
that what economics is really about? not spoon-feeding billionaires
at the cost of food for the hungry? —Nils Peterson
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The Phoenician Scheme:
Humans have a new way of seeing infrared light, without the need for clunky night-vision goggles. Researchers have made the first contact lenses to convey infrared vision — and the devices work even when people have their eyes closed.
Every year, judges for the International Booker Prize search for the best works of fiction translated into English over the previous twelve months. We asked Anton Hur, the novelist, translator and 2025 judge, to talk us through the six-book shortlist—including five novels and this year’s winner, the first short story collection ever to triumph.
Every time you see an apple spontaneously break away from a tree, it falls downward. You therefore claim that there is a law of physics: apples fall downward from trees. But how can you really know? After all, tomorrow you might see an apple that falls upward. How is science possible at all? Philosophers, as you might expect, have thought hard about this. Branden Fitelson explains how a better understanding of probability can help us decide when new evidence is actually confirming our beliefs.
Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as Penelope Fitzgerald said, Woolf’s techniques were taken as far as they could go. She had the genius to exhaust a whole line of artistic inquiry, and many have felt exhausted by her.
Seventeen years ago, Eric Topol, a cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, set out to discover why some people age so well, when others don’t. Aged 53 at the time, Topol considered healthy aging to be of deep scientific — and personal — interest. He also suspected the answer was genetic. So, with colleagues, he spent more than six years sequencing the genomes of about 1,400 people in their 80s or older with no major chronic diseases. All qualified, Topol felt, as “Super Agers.”
It’s said that when “War and Peace” was finished and about to be published, Tolstoy looked at the huge book and suddenly exclaimed, “The yacht race! I forgot to put in the yacht race!” At 1,174 pages, Ron Chernow’s “Mark Twain” is essentially the same length as “War and Peace,” but seemingly nothing has been overlooked or left out. Normally, this would be a signal weakness in a biography — shape and form do matter — but Chernow writes with such ease and clarity that even long sections on, say, Twain’s business ventures prove horribly fascinating as the would-be tycoon descends, with Sophoclean inexorability, into financial collapse and bankruptcy.
Capuchin monkeys on a remote Panamanian island are abducting babies from howler monkey families, in a first-of-its-kind trend.
On February 24, 1947, Eugene Le Bar began a bus trip from Mexico City that would take him to New York. By March 1, when he arrives in New York he was not feeling very well but went sightseeing nonetheless, coming in contact with lots of people. On March 10, he died in Willard Parker hospital from the rare but extremely deadly hemorrhagic smallpox. Only five percent of smallpox cases take this intensely virulent form, so it is not surprising that Le Bar’s case was originally misdiagnosed. Overall, twelve persons were infected with traditional, not hemorrhagic, smallpox (with a much higher survival rate) from Le Bar’s ring of contacts; two died. The infection rate was low because New York embarked on a mass vaccination effort to prevent the spread of the disease. Six million New Yorkers were vaccinated against smallpox in the spring of 1947, an enormous accomplishment by the local public health service employees and hospital personnel as shots were given around the clock to prevent an epidemic.
Molecules in urine and blood can reveal how much of a person’s diet comes from ultra-processed foods, according to a study published in PLOS Medicine today
A novel about a Palestinian woman who participates in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags has won this year’s Swansea University 
The announcement last week that a nine-month-old baby in Philadelphia has been cured of a rare genetic disorder by gene editing is a great moment in medical history. For the first time, doctors have altered a gene inside many cells in the liver of a living human being using CRISPR, the molecular tool borrowed from microbes that can