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Is Economics Incompatible With Humanities?

Economics, Morson and Schapiro say, has three systematic biases: it ignores the role of culture, it ignores the fact that “to understand people one must tell stories about them,” and it constantly touches on ethical questions beyond its ken. Culture, stories, and ethics are things that can’t be reduced to equations, and economics accordingly has difficulty with them. Morson and Schapiro’s solution is to use the study of the humanities, and particularly of realist fiction, to broaden perspectives and to reintroduce to economics those three missing factors.

How Science Is Building Better Dancers

The Royal Ballet is rich in tradition, but the company’s 97 dancers are now supported by a 17-strong team of sports science and healthcare experts. “Our facilities are now similar to those of a Premier League football club,” explains Gregory Retter, clinical director of ballet healthcare. “Strength, jumping, force attenuation, cardiovascular fitness, psychological wellbeing and nutrition; all support the dancer to be free to create artistic excellence. This is a completely new concept in dance.”

How Is It We Acquire A Taste For Something?

Whatever the answer to this question, the phenomenon is rife. Children are unlikely to appreciate a sip of beer. Yet a decade later they may relish the evening’s first pint. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, they have acquired the beer-taste. Taste acquisition does not stop at beer and blizzards: consider coffee and classical music, olives and oysters.

So Why Did Amazon Price My Book At $2630.52?

“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.

Why Does Cheap Architecture Have To Look So… Cheap? (Can Anything Be Done?)

The question is whether architecture and design could do anything to alleviate walmartism. It is difficult because there is a kind of Heisenberg Paradox at work here: the moment designers try to intervene, even if they do so pro bono, the result almost inevitably becomes more expensive. Anything that differentiates, softens, or responds to the human body, costs money.