From The New Yorker, information isn’t necessarily making investors, or the market, any smarter — in fact, what’s driving the market crazy of late may be that it knows too much; and before the financial system went bust, it went postmodern. More pain to come: The financial crisis bolstered Obama's win — and could hasten his downfall. From Carnegie Council, a panel on The Shape of the World to Come: Charting the Geopolitics of a New Century by Laurent Cohen-Tanugi; and a panel on Ark of the Liberties: America and the World by Ted Widmer. A review of The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems by Van Jones. More on Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays and All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays by George Orwell. Here are 6 national anthems that will make you tremble with fear. From CT, a review of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue; and a review of Adam's Ancestors, Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins by David N. Livingstone. The prologue to The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth's Climate by David Archer. Improbable research into how to make a better, lighter hammer involved two mechanical engineering students carrying out a post-mortem on a dead woodpecker.