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One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

by VirgilioWjd Posted on December 16, 2013

Mother Jones

On Monday, this year’s Black List—the annual list of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood as voted on by over 250 studio executives—was announced via Twitter. This list features 72 titles, six fewer than last year’s. Previous Black Lists have included what would become three of the last five Best Picture Academy Award winners: Argo, The King’s Speech, and Slumdog Millionaire. Being on the list gives your script roughly a 120 percent higher chance of getting made into a feature film by a studio than if it were an average unproduced script.

One of the screenplays inducted onto this year’s Black List (check out the complete list here) is by self-described “newbie” Stephany Folsom, and is intriguingly titled, 1969: A Space Odyssey or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon (an obvious reference to both the title of Stanley Kubrick’s classic black-comedy satire from 1964, and to the director’s 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968).

Folsom’s 108-page script (a drama) focuses on “Barbara,” a lone wolf working in the publicity department at NASA’s office in Washington, DC, in 1969. The story is an alternate history of how, as the Cold War rages, Barbara reaches out to and convinces acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick to work with NASA to fake the moon and one-up the Soviets.

“Hijinks ensue,” Folsom says.

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One of the Films on This Year’s Black List is an Alternate History of Stanley Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing

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How the Royal Navy Helped the Late Peter O’Toole Become an Acting Legend

by JanisEasley Posted on December 15, 2013

Mother Jones

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Peter O’Toole, the phenomenally talented Irish-English actor famous for his roles in such films as Lawrence of Arabia and Becket, died on Saturday at the age of 81. He was being treated at the Wellington Hospital in London after a long illness, according to his agent.

“My thoughts are with Peter O’Toole’s family and friends,” British Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted. “His performance in my favourite film, Lawrence of Arabia, was stunning.” President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins added: “Ireland, and the world, has lost one of the giants of film and theatre…I was privileged to know him as a friend since 1969…He was unsurpassed for the grace he brought to every performance on and off the stage.”

O’Toole leaves behind a towering legacy in theater and cinema. In his earlier days, he was also a notorious party boy who lost much of his sizeable Lawrence of Arabia paycheck in a two-night gambling spree with co-star Omar Sharif at casinos in Casablanca and Beirut. “I was happy to grab the hand of misfortune, dissipation, riotous living, and violence,” O’Toole told the Sunday Express in 1995.

His epic carousing, however, turned to cautionary tale when in the mid-1970s he was diagnosed with pancreatitis, and subsequently had chunks of intestinal tubing removed; he then gave up the bottle, having gone to the brink of death. He would later say of his unexpected recovery, “It proved inconvenient to a few people, but there you go.”

O’Toole earned eight Academy Award nominations without bagging a single win (a record), but was presented with an Honorary Oscar in 2003. In a way, O’Toole, a former journalist-in-training, owed his entire career in acting to a conversation he had with a skipper while serving in the Royal Navy. As he told NPR:

I served with men who’d been blown up in the Atlantic, who’d seen their friends drinking icy bubbles in oil and being machine gunned in the water. And I mentioned that I wasn’t particularly satisfied with what I was doing in civilian life, which was working for a newspaper. And the skipper said to me one night, have you any unanswered calls inside you that you don’t understand or can’t qualify? I said, well, yes, I do. I quite fancy myself either as a poet or an actor. He said, well, if you don’t at least give it a try, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

In honor of his passing, here are a few great clips of the actor when he wasn’t acting on stage or in a big movie: O’Toole’s classic entrance on Late Show with David Letterman:

O’Toole and Orson Welles debating Hamlet on the BBC in 1963:

…and, finally, O’Toole reciting the Spice Girls:

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How the Royal Navy Helped the Late Peter O’Toole Become an Acting Legend

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At Least 194 Children Have Been Shot to Death Since Newtown.

by tunwoelx7 Posted on December 10, 2013

Mother Jones

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You’ve heard this story before, the one that played out again the week of Thanksgiving—this time in Lakeland, Florida—where 2-year-old Taj Ayesh got his little hands on his father’s loaded pistol, pulled the trigger, and crumpled to the ground. You may have heard about 9-year-old Daniel Wiley, who was playing outside his house in Harrisburg, Texas, when a 13-year-old mishandled an unsecured shotgun, blasting Wiley in the face. You may also have heard about 2-year-old Camryn Shultz of Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, whose embittered father put a bullet in her head before turning the gun on himself. Maybe you didn’t hear about the case in which a child shot others and then committed suicide, but that also happened this year. Twice.

A year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Mother Jones has analyzed the subsequent deaths of 194 children ages 12 and under who were reported in news accounts to have died in gun accidents, homicides, and suicides. They are spread across 43 states, from inner cities to tiny rural towns.

Following Sandy Hook, the National Rifle Association and its allies argued that arming more adults is the solution to protecting children, be it from deranged mass shooters or from home invaders. But the data we collected stands as a stark rejoinder to that view:

127 of the children died from gunshots in their own homes, while dozens more died in the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives.
72 of the young victims either pulled the trigger themselves or were shot dead by another kid.
In those 72 cases, only 4 adults have been held criminally liable.
At least 52 deaths involved a child handling a gun left unsecured.

Additional findings include:

60 children died at the hands of their own parents, 50 of them in homicides.
The average age of the victims was 6 years old.
More than two-thirds of the victims were boys, as were more than three-quarters of the kids who pulled the trigger.
The problem was worst over the past year in the South, which saw at least 92 child gun deaths, followed by the Midwest (44), the West (38), and the East (20).

Our investigation drew on hundreds of local and national news reports. In some cases specific details remain unclear—often these tragedies are just a blip on the media’s radar. As with previous reports in our ongoing investigation of gun violence, Mother Jones has published all the data we collected in downloadable spreadsheet form. (For an ongoing tally of reported gun deaths, see this Slate project.)

As I reported in May, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that over the last decade an average of about 200 children ages 12 and under died from guns every year. But those numbers don’t capture the full scope of the problem, due to inconsistencies in how states report shootings, and because the gun lobby long ago helped kill off federal funding for gun violence research. Our media-based analysis of child gun deaths also understates the problem, as numerous such killings likely never appear in the news. New research by two Boston surgeons drawing on pediatric records suggests that the real toll is higher: They’ve found about 500 deaths of children and teens per year, and an additional 7,500 hospitalizations from gunshot wounds.

“It’s almost a routine problem in pediatric practice,” says Dr. Judith Palfrey, a former president of the American Academy of Pediatrics who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Palfrey herself (who is not involved with the above study) lost a 12-year-old patient she was close with to gun violence, she told me.

No other affluent society has this problem to such an extreme. According to a recent study by the Children’s Defense Fund, the gun death rate for children and teens in the US is four times greater than in Canada, the country with the next highest rate, and 65 times greater than in Germany and Britain.

The pediatric community has been focused on elevating the issue. Public health researchers have found that 43 percent of homes with guns and kids contain at least one unlocked firearm. One study found that a third of 8- to 12-year-old boys who came across an unlocked handgun picked it up and pulled the trigger. On Tuesday, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a video emphasizing physicians’ role in keeping children safe from gun violence. The academy also issued specific recommendations this fall, including making sure firearms have trigger locks and storing them unloaded and under lock and key.

State legislators around the country have sought to require such precautions for gun owners, but the gun lobby has fought them vigorously. The NRA and other groups downplay the dangers firearms pose to children—in part by citing deficient federal data.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, research has shown that when doctors consult with their patients about the risk of keeping firearms in a home, it leads to “significantly higher rates” of handgun removal or safe storage practices. Here, too, the NRA has done battle: It backed the so-called “Docs vs. Glocks” law passed in Florida in 2011, which forbid doctors from asking patients about firearms.

That law may have come with a price: Among the 194 child gun deaths we analyzed, 17 took place in Florida. Seven were accidents, including three involving unsecured weapons in homes. “The children were covered in blood,” a shaken witness told a reporter after toddlers in a Lake City home played with a gun and fatally shot an 11-year-old boy in the neck.

Florida’s tally was second only to that of Texas, which saw 19 children killed over the last year. By comparison, the other two of the four most populous states, California and New York, saw 11 and 3 deaths, respectively. Already known for strict gun regulations, California and New York both passed additional restrictions after Sandy Hook. Texas, meanwhile, enacted 10 new laws deregulating guns, including weakening safety training requirements for concealed-carry permit holders and blocking universities and local governments from restricting firearms. Florida tightened mental health controls this year—one of 15 states to do so—but has otherwise operated as a de facto laboratory for permissive gun laws, including its Stand Your Ground statute made famous by the Trayvon Martin case.

In scores of the cases we studied, the type of weapon involved was either unknown to law enforcement authorities or not specified in news reports. But at least 76 involved a handgun, while another 34 involved long guns. (Semi-automatic handguns are also the most common weapon used in mass shootings.)

Often when kids are killed in gun accidents, public outrage focuses on the parents. But legal repercussions are another matter: While charges may be pending in some of the 84 accidental cases, we found only 9 in which a parent or adult guardian has been held criminally liable. And in 72 cases in which a child or teen pulled the trigger, only four adults have been convicted. According to the nonpartisan Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which tracks state regulations closely, only 14 states and the District of Columbia have strong laws imposing criminal liability for negligent storage of guns with respect to children. (Florida, Texas, and California are among the 14.)

What happened a year ago in Newtown is still in some ways hard to fathom. The nation mourns again for the victims and families. But as Palfrey also puts it, “Newtown concentrated the horror in one place.” Whether by malice or tragic mistake, the day-to-day toll of children dying from guns goes on.

The data from our investigation can be viewed in two ways. See an interactive photo gallery of the 194 victims:

See the full data set behind the investigation in spreadsheet form:

Also see our award-winning investigation, America Under the Gun: A Special Report on the Rise of Mass Shootings.

Research contributed by Maggie Caldwell, Nina Liss-Schultz, and AJ Vicens. Charts produced by Jaeah Lee. Video produced by Brett Brownell.

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Case of Insect Interruptus Yields a Rare Fossil Find

by Myrna Posted on November 6, 2013

Researchers say the oldest fossil of two insects copulating — in this case, froghoppers killed in a volcanic eruption 165 million years ago — was identified in what is now Northeastern China. View original article –  Case of Insect Interruptus Yields a Rare Fossil Find ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: Helen Caldicott, Chernobyl and the New York Academy of SciencesNational Briefing | South: Arkansas: ExxonMobil Fines Proposed After Oil SpillDot Earth Blog: Wide Rejection of Labels for Genetically Engineered Food in Washington State ;

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Nitrogen pollution from farming lingers for decades

by JaimeLockett Posted on October 23, 2013

Nitrogen pollution from farming lingers for decades

By

Shutterstock

There goes the groundwater.

When a farmworker sprays fertilizer over a field, there’s a good chance he or she will be outlived by nitrogen pollution from that fertilizer.

A 30-year study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that nitrogen could linger in soil for nearly a century after fertilizer is applied.

Nitrogen from fertilizer helps crops grow, but it can be poisonous for humans and animals. When nitrates leach from farmed soil into groundwater, they can make it undrinkable.

“There’s a lot of fertilizer nitrogen that has accumulated in agricultural soils over the last few decades which will continue to leak as nitrate towards groundwater,” said researcher Mathieu Sebilo, the paper’s lead author.

Three decades after scientists applied fertilizer to sugar beet and winter wheat on two small experimental plots in France, they found that just 61 to 65 percent of its nitrogen had been gobbled up by the crops. Another 12 to 15 percent was still in the soil, and 8 to 12 percent had leached into the groundwater. (The scientists used a fertilizer with an artificially high concentration of a specific nitrogen isotope to help them track its movement over the decades.)

Based on those results, the scientists project that some of the nitrogen will still be lingering in the plots in another 50 years time.


Source
Long-term fate of nitrate fertilizer in agricultural soils, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Nitrogen fertilizer remains in soils and leaks towards groundwater for decades, researchers find, University of Calgary

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Winery plans to chop down California redwoods to make room for vineyards

by qdj9iiiej Posted on October 21, 2013

Winery plans to chop down California redwoods to make room for vineyards

By

Richard Masoner / Cyclelicious

Fuck off, redwoods. We’ve got grapes that need that space.

Global warming and the growing global appetite for wine have vineyards on the march.

As the climate in southern England warms to resemble that of France’s Champagne region, British growers are cultivating grapes that make bubbly. Viniculturists are also setting up operations in remote parts of British Columbia and China. And in California, the booming wine industry is crawling out of warming valleys and edging toward the coast — which is bad news for coastal ecosystems.

Areas suitable for vineyards in the world’s major wine-producing regions could shrink between 19 and 73 percent by 2050, according to a study published in April in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers say growers will look for new lands on which to plant their vines, razing wild areas in their wine-making quests.

“Climate change may cause establishment of vineyards at higher elevations,” the scientists wrote. That “may lead to conversion of natural vegetation.”

And so it is in California’s Sonoma County, where environmentalists are fighting in court to prevent a Spanish winemaker from leveling 154 acres of coast redwoods and Douglas firs to make space for new grapevines. NPR reports:

Redwoods only grow in the relatively cool coastal region of Northern California and southern Oregon. Parts of this range, such as northwestern Sonoma County, have become increasingly coveted by winemakers.

Chris Poehlmann, president of a small organization called Friends of the Gualala River, says the wine industry is creeping toward the coast as California’s interior valleys heat up and consumers show preferences for cooler-weather grapes like pinot noir.

“Inexorably, the wine industry is looking for new places to plant vineyards,” says Poehlmann, whose group is among the plaintiffs.

Artesa Vineyards and Winery has permission from California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to level thousands of trees. The environmentalists are suing the agency, arguing that its approval of the plan violated the state’s environmental laws.

Poehlmann says the trees that would be cleared are up to 80 feet tall, providing wildlife habitat and protecting streams from erosion. But the winery’s spin doctor would like you to know that these are not old-growth trees (most are 50 years old), so “there are no forests” on the site. Just an awful lot of majestic trees.


Source
A Fight Over Vineyards Pits Redwoods Against Red Wine, NPR
Climate change, wine, and conservation, PNAS

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Seas may rise 10 yards during centuries ahead

by Obeey99 Posted on July 15, 2013

Seas may rise 10 yards during centuries ahead

By John Upton

Shutterstock

The future view from your favorite beach.

Sea-level rise is currently measured in millimeters per year, but longer-term effects of global warming are going to force our descendants to measure sea-level rise in meters or yards.

Each Celsius degree of global warming is expected to raise sea levels during the centuries ahead by 2.3 meters, or 2.5 yards, according to a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The world is currently trying (and failing) to reach an agreement that would limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius. Business-as-usual practices could yet raise temperatures by 4 (or even more) degrees Celsius.

Multiply 2.5 yards by 4 and you are left with the specter of tides that lap 10 yards higher in the future than today. That’s 30 feet, the height of a three-story building. For comparison, the seas rose less than a foot last century.

Here is a chart from the new study that illustrates long-term sea-level rise projections under four warming scenarios:

PNASClick to embiggen.

Now, it’s important to note that the new study looks at sea-level rise over the next 2,000 years. The study doesn’t make predictions for how rapidly the seas will rise during that time frame; it just lays out what is possible in the long term. From the study:

On a 2000-year time scale, the sea-level contribution will be largely independent of the exact warming path during the first century. At the same time, 2000 years is a relevant time scale, for example, for society’s cultural heritage.

The difference between this study and others, some of which have foretold less dramatic rises in water levels, is the extent to which it considers ice-sheet melting.

Compared with the amount of water locked up in the world’s glaciers, which are melting rapidly, Earth’s two ice sheets hold incredibly vast reservoirs. The Antarctic ice sheet alone could inundate the world with 60 yards of water if it melted entirely. And then there’s the Greenland ice sheet, which suffered an unprecedented melt last summer.

The ice sheets are not yet melting as dramatically as the glaciers, insulated as they are by their tremendous bulk. In fact, the melting glaciers and the melting ice sheets are contributing roughly equally to today’s rising seas, despite the differences in their overall bulk.

But a hastening decline of the ice sheets is inevitable as accumulating greenhouse gases take their toll.

The authors of the new study, led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, analyzed sea levels and temperatures from millennia past, combining those findings with climate models to get a glimpse of the shifting coastlines of the future. From the study:

[C]limate records suggest a sea-level sensitivity of as much as several meters per degree of warming during previous intervals of Earth history when global temperatures were similar to or warmer than present. While sea-level rise over the last century has been dominated by ocean warming and loss of glaciers, the sensitivity suggested from records of past sea level indicates important contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

The study’s lead author, Potsdam researcher Anders Levermann, said the results reveal the inevitability of rising water levels as heat accumulates on Earth.

“Continuous sea-level rise is something we cannot avoid unless global temperatures go down again,” he said in a statement. “Thus we can be absolutely certain that we need to adapt. Sea-level rise might be slow on time scales on which we elect governments, but it is inevitable and therefore highly relevant for almost everything we build along our coastlines, for many generations to come.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change could bring more hurricanes

by pawel Posted on July 9, 2013

Climate change could bring more hurricanes

By John Upton

NASA Goddard

Climate scientists have long predicted that cyclones and hurricanes would become more destructive as the climate changes, but that the number of such storms each year would decrease, or perhaps remain constant.

That notion was challenged Monday by Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Emanuel’s computer models foresee stronger cyclones and hurricanes, in line with previous research, but they also foresee a growing number of the storms each year as warming continues.

The Carbon Brief explained Emanuel’s research:

Six global scale climate models were used to produce a broad picture about what earth’s climate would be like under high levels of greenhouse gas emissions. From this, information about air and sea temperatures, wind patterns and atmospheric moisture, was used to simulate where and when tropical cyclones might occur in the future.

The results suggest that the number of tropical cyclones could exceed 100 per year by about 2070, compared to an average of 90 per year at the moment. Tropical cyclones could get more intense too, if the modelling is right.

The total amount of energy tropical cyclones release is expected to increase by 45 per cent over the course of the 21st century. Some of that energy would be spent by the extra 10 or so tropical cyclones per year, but half of it would be released by intense storms getting even stronger – meaning higher winds, taller storm surges and greater economic costs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Emanuel’s findings are being received with some skepticism by other atmospheric scientists, at least for the moment. From Climate Central:

James Elsner, an atmospheric scientist at Florida State University who was not involved in this study, downplayed the study’s conclusions given the considerable uncertainties involved with using computer models to simulate complex storms such as hurricanes.

“The results from the new Emanuel are provocative, but in my opinion there is little reason to put much weight on them when considering what might happen to tropical cyclone activity during the next 50 to 80 years,” he said in an email to Climate Central.

Emanuel points out that scientists are still learning what drives cyclonic frequency, which helps to explain the discrepancy between previous studies and this one. “The physics behind these numbers remains enigmatic, and the general relationship between tropical cyclone activity and climate is only beginning to be understood,” he wrote in the paper.

So will there be more cyclones and hurricanes as the climate changes, or not? We’ll be watching to see whether other climate scientists start reaching conclusions similar to Emanuel’s. If they do, we could be in for an even bumpier ride as the globe warms.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change could be leading to more El Ninos

by Aale Harry Posted on July 3, 2013

Climate change could be leading to more El Ninos

By John Upton

Shutterstock

Peruvian fishermen came up with the name El Niño, Spanish for “Christ child,” because it normally arrived around Christmas.

El Niño is one of Earth’s most influential climatic phenomena. Its occasional arrival, heralded by warming in parts of the eastern Pacific Ocean, can be a harbinger of floods in Peru, droughts in Australia, harsh winters in Europe, and hurricanes in the Caribbean. Yet we know precious little about it.

But this week, two separate scientific studies chipped away at the mystery.

One study reveals that the El Niño phenomenon has been occurring more frequently as the globe has warmed. The other paper promises to dramatically improve our ability to foretell the weather pattern’s arrival.

A team of scientists reported Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change on the increased frequency of El Niños over the past half century. From The Christian Science Monitor:

Scientists compiled some 2,222 tree-ring chronologies of the past seven centuries from both the mid-latitudes in both hemispheres and the tropics. Tree rings can provide an accurate record of historical climate pattern, packing in their width and color information about the precipitation, wind, and temperature conditions at the time at which the tree was growing.

Scientists found that the tree ring patterns in the 20th century suggested that El Niño had been more active then than during the last seven centuries, meaning that long-term El Niño patterns have dovetailed with the global warming that characterized that century.

“This suggests that many models underestimate the sensitivity to radiative perturbations in greenhouse gases,” said Shang-Ping Xie, co-author and meteorology professor at the International Pacific Research Center. “Our results now provide a guide to improve the accuracy of climate models and their projections of future [El Niño–Southern Oscillation] activity.”

“If this trend of increasing ENSO activity continues, we expect to see more weather extremes such as floods and droughts,” she said.

A study by a separate team published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes a new method for predicting El Niño’s arrival. That could be especially useful for farmers who want to know which varieties of crops they should plant each year. From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

The forecasting algorithm is based on the interactions between sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and the rest of the ocean, and appears to warn of an El Nino event one year in advance instead of the current six months.

The German scientists analysed more than 200 measurement points in the Pacific dating back to the 1950s. The interactions between distant points helped predict whether the El Niño warming would come about in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

They used the model in 2011 to correctly predict the absence of an El Niño event last year, while conventional forecasts wrongly said there would be significant warming well into 2012.

Too good to be true? Time will tell. From the same news report:

“At the moment they’ve found a pattern, but they’re not really explaining where that pattern comes from,” [Alex Sen Gupta, senior lecturer at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales,] says.

He says the model needs to be tested further against standard models to assess if the findings are physically based, not just a correlation.

“I think give it another two or three El Niños and if it predicts those correctly more than a year in advance you’d start to think we’re on to something.”

Aw, c’mon Mr. Science Man — do we really have to wait that long? Oh well, at least those two or three more El Niños can be expected to come more quickly than they used to.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Climate change could be leading to more El Ninos

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Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

by Myrna Posted on May 10, 2013

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Genre: Psychology

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: October 25, 2011

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Seller: Macmillan / Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC


Major New York Times bestsellerWinner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 TitleOne of The Economist ’s 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal 's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow , Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking , Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

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