The Joy of Quiet. The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) Existence is elsewhere. — André Breton, “The Surrealist Manifesto” 1. The Juice David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year.
From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco: At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. In a follow-up article, Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. (a) the film was bad; (b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or (c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.[2] ERROL MORRIS: Why not? The Danger of Neglecting Time Alone. What we can learn from procrastination. Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States.
The clothes belonged to his friend and colleague Joseph Stiglitz, who had left them behind when visiting, so Akerlof was eager to send the box off. But there was a problem. The combination of Indian bureaucracy and what Akerlof called “my own ineptitude in such matters” meant that doing so was going to be a hassle—indeed, he estimated that it would take an entire workday.
So he put off dealing with it, week after week. This went on for more than eight months, and it was only shortly before Akerlof himself returned home that he managed to solve his problem: another friend happened to be sending some things back to the U.S., and Akerlof was able to add Stiglitz’s clothes to the shipment. Given the vagaries of intercontinental mail, it’s possible that Akerlof made it back to the States before Stiglitz’s shirts did. Simplicity: The Next Big Thing - Rosabeth Moss Kanter - HarvardBusiness.org.