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Economics

Monetary Faith

Philip Pilkington

Central banks argue that economists should have faith in the natural interest rate and try their best to accommodate the banking system to it. But shouldn’t it rather be judged by its works?

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Physics

Secrets

Jeremy Bernstein

Alex Wellerstein’s fascinating new book, Restricted Data, confirms what Jeremy Bernstein has long believed to be true: the information needed to make a nuclear weapon has been in circulation for a long time.

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Mathematics

The Game of Life

Daniel Kleitman

The late John Horton Conway had a gift for making complicated mathematics appear simple. His contributions included a solution for the major problem of group theory and the concept of surreal numbers.

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Philosophy

Songlines

Sheldon Lee Glashow

Jeremy Bernstein’s book A Song for Molly is a fantasy in the form of fictional autobiography. He weaves around many seminal intellectual achievements in a delightful example of episodic storytelling.

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Political Science

A Passage from India

David Berlinski

In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra reveals that in his thoughts on British imperialism, he is very much a member of the moral majority. Imperialism was, Mishra believes, evil in its consequences.

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Physics

Complexity Far from Equilibrium

Michael Engel

Life is a sophisticated example of dynamic self-assembly, which occurs far from equilibrium. Can researchers harness this phenomenon to purposefully create and control more diversely complex behavior?

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Economics

+ French version

Self-Made

Jean-Paul Fitoussi

Richard Robb defines a category of actions that “are neither rational nor irrational, but rather one-time acts of will that no one, not even the individual who undertakes them, can predict.”

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Mathematics

At Lunch with Freeman Dyson

William Press

The prisoner’s dilemma, played once, involves limited strategy. But consider the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Using information from the previous plays, each player can try to outwit their accomplice.

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Medicine

On the Futility of Contact Tracing

Jay Bhattacharya & Mikko Packalen

Contact tracing may be useful when the number of cases in an epidemic is very small, and only if it is applied aggressively. In cases that do not fit this description, it may make an outbreak worse.