If you like the idea of efficient markets, then Bob Swarup’s Money Mania is not the book for you. Swarup, who has a Ph.D. in cosmology but has spent most of his career in the world of high finance, delivers this scabrous appraisal of those who cling to the misconception that humans are rational: “The dedicated economist is a learned nymphomaniac in theory, his or her virginity still intact due to never having actually met a real human being on their academic travels.” In his view, we are not so much Homo economicus—the ideological construct much beloved by those selfsame rationalist economists—as

In the American-history textbook I used in my public high school, the chapter that covered Reconstruction included a photo of Thaddeus Stevens, the nineteenth-century radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, who appeared, to judge by the evidence of this daguerreotype, to have been in a foul mood. I distinctly remember how the photo’s caption referenced Stevens’s glowering, stormy countenance as an outward and visible sign of his spiteful scorn for the vanquished Confederacy. As far as the textbook’s authors were concerned, such vengeance—and only such vengeance—accounted for what they

It is the unfortunate fate of many women of a certain period to be recalled not as individuals but as “flappers,” a word that seems, to modern chroniclers, a nearly irresistible invitation to a morality tale. A woman of the 1920s might refuse domesticity without consequence; a flapper, on the other hand, will burn brightly for a time before descending into the kind of callow, knowing narcissism that completes a particular narrative arc. We know many of these stories by heart: Zelda Fitzgerald fell into madness, and Tamara de Lempicka into obscurity. Tallulah Bankhead was a drunk, Josephine

By the spring of 2008, nine months after the first iPhone reached the trembling hands of the American consumer, Steve Jobs had grown so suspicious of Google’s nascent Android project that he took an unusual step: He personally traversed the six miles from Apple’s central command in Cupertino to Google’s Mountain View headquarters to hold a meeting with the wizards of the great global search engine on their turf.

What he saw there incensed him: a smartphone prototype that offered many of the same features highlighted on the iPhone, like multifinger touch—an innovation he claimed as Apple’s

John Foster Dulles was a dullard and a prig. “He was driven to find and confront enemies, quick to make moral judgments, and not given to subtlety or doubt,” the former New York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer writes in his new biography of the Dulles brothers. In 1957, Foster (as he was familiarly known) gave his sister Eleanor a Christmas present of “several yellow legal pads” and a check. Kinzer quotes the British politician Harold Macmillan, summarizing a meeting with the Eisenhower administration’s dour new secretary of state: “His speech was slow, but it easily kept pace with his thoughts.”