NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, “A Jazz Night to Remember: The Unique Magic of Keith Jarrett’s ‘The Köln Concert,’” The Wall Street Journal, October 11, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122367103134923957.

2. Vera Brandes was speaking to a BBC documentary team. See For One Night Only: The Cologne Concert, BBC Radio 4, December 29, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0103z8j.

3. For One Night Only: The Cologne Concert. Jarrett himself later described the instrument as “a seven-foot piano which hadn’t been adjusted for a very long time and sounded like a very poor imitation of a harpsichord or a piano with tacks in it.” Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (London: Paladin, 1992), p. 71.

4. Carr, Keith Jarrett, pp. 71–73.

1. CREATIVITY

1. David Bowie, interview by Uncut magazine, 1999. Available at http://www.bowiegoldenyears.com/low.html.

2. Paul Trynka, “Berlin: Follow in David Bowie’s Tracks,” The Independent, March 4, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/berlin-follow-in-david-bowies-tracks-2232296.html.

3. Tobias Rüther, Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (London: Reaktion Books, 2014), p. 45.

4. Sasha Frere-Jones, “Ambient Genius,” The New Yorker, July 7, 2014.

5. Paul Trynka, Starman: David Bowie: The Definitive Biography (London: Sphere, 2011), p. 289.

6. I’m indebted to my friend Dom Camus for this example and a very useful conversation about it on January 12, 2016.

7. Shaun Larcom, Ferdinand Rauch, and Tim Willems, “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation: Striking Evidence from the London Underground Network,” Oxford University Department of Economics Working Paper, September 2015, http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/14046/paper-755.pdf.

8. Author interview with Brian Eno, February 24, 2015.

9. Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, “Sound Visionary,” Financial Times, July 1, 2011, http://next.ft.com/content/6407cc22-a226-11e0-bb06-00144feabdc0.

10. Author interview with Brian Eno, February 24, 2015.

11. Amit Sood, Mayo Clinic, “Multitasking Isn’t Working for Me: How Can I Focus My Attention and Improve My Concentration?” http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/expert-answers/how-to-focus/faq-20058383; Margarita Tartakovsky, “12 Foolproof Tips for Finding Focus,” Psych Central, psychcentral.com/lib/12-foolproof-tips-for-finding-focus/; Caroline Williams, “Concentrate! How to Tame a Wandering Mind,” BBC Future, October 16, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20141015-concentrate-how-to-focus-better.

12. In addition to the research described in the text, readers may be interested in Shelley Carson, “Cognitive Disinhibition, Creativity, and Psychopathology,” in The Wiley Handbook of Genius, ed. Dean Keith Simonton (Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), and Örjan de Manzano, Simon Cervenka, Anke Karabanov, Lars Farde, and Fredrik Ullén, “Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box,” PLoS One 5, no. 5, e10670 (May 17, 2010), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010670.

13. Shelley Carson, Daniel Higgins, and Jordan Peterson, “Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 3 (2003), pp. 499–506, DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.3.499.

14. Holly A. White and Priti Shah, “Creative Style and Achievement in Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” Personality and Individual Differences 50, no. 5 (2011), pp. 673–677, DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.12.015.

15. Charlan Jeanne Nemeth and Julianne L. Kwan, “Originality of Word Associations as a Function of Majority vs. Minority Influence,” Social Psychology Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1985), pp. 277–282.

16. E. Langer, Y. Steshenko, B. Cummings, N. Eisenkraft, and S. Campbell, “Mistakes as a Mindful Cue,” prepublication manuscript, Harvard University, 2004; the work is described in Ellen Langer’s On Becoming an Artist (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 82.

17. Paul Howard-Jones, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Elspeth A. Samuel, Ian R. Summers, and Guy Claxton, “Semantic Divergence and Creative Story Generation: An fMRI Investigation,” Cognitive Brain Research 25, no. 1 (September 2005), pp. 240–250.

18. Trynka, Starman: David Bowie, p. 290.

19. Author interview with Brian Eno, February 24, 2015.

20. Ibid.

21. C. Diemand-Yauman et al., “Fortune Favors the Bold (and the Italicized): Effects of Disfluency on Educational Outcomes,” Cognition 118, no. 1 (January 2010), DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012.

22. David Sheppard, On Some Faraway Beach (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009), p. 5.

23. “President Obama Honors Outstanding Early-Career Scientists,” White House Press Release, July 23, 2012, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/07/23/president-obama-honors-outstanding-early-career-scientists; Erez Aiden, “Zoom!” GE & Science Prize for Young Life Scientists, Science, December 2, 2011, http://www.sciencemag.org/content/334/6060/1222.full.pdf; “NIH Announces 79 Awards to Encourage Creative Ideas in Science,” NIH Press Release, September 20, 2011, http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2011/od-20.htm.

24. Ed Yong, “The Renaissance Man: How to Become a Scientist Over and Over Again,” Not Exactly Rocket Science (blog), June 8, 2011, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/06/08/the-renaissance-man-how-to-become-a-scientist-over-and-over-again/.

25. Ibid.; also Amy Barth, “Five Questions for the Man Who Put Three D’s in DNA,” Discover, March 2010, http://discovermagazine.com/2010/mar/05-questions-he-put-three-d-in-dna-explains-how-it-works.

26. Robert S. Root-Bernstein, Maurine Bernstein, and Helen Gamier, “Identification of Scientists Making Long-Term, High-Impact Contributions, with Notes on Their Methods of Working,” Creativity Research Journal 6, no. 4 (1993), pp. 329–343, DOI: 10.1080/10400419309534491.

27. Oliver Johnson, “Jurassic Park Past: My Time with Michael Crichton,” Hodderscape, June 16, 2015, http://www.hodderscape.co.uk/jurassic-park-past-my-time-with-michael-crichton/.

28. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Innovation (New York: HarperCollins, 1996).

29. Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2012), pp. 25–27, 39–41.

30. Ibid., p. 29.

31. Howard E. Gruber and Sara N. Davis, “Inching Our Way Up Mount Olympus: The Evolving-Systems Approach to Creative Thinking,” in Robert J. Sternberg, The Nature of Creativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); see also Keith R. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 376.

32. Howard Gruber, Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity (London: Wildwood House, 1974).

33. “David Bowie: Verbatim,” Radio 4 Archive Hour, January 30, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06z5pts.

34. Kerri Smith, “Neuroscience: Idle Minds,” Nature, September 19, 2012, http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-idle-minds-1.11440.

35. Nick Stockton, “What’s Up with That: Your Best Thinking Seems to Happen in the Shower,” Wired, August 5, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/08/shower-thoughts/.

36. John Kao, Jamming: The Art & Discipline of Business Creativity (London: HarperCollins, 1997), p. 46.

37. Gia Kourlas, “Twyla Tharp’s Fifty Years of Forward Movement,” The New York Times, April 4, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/arts/dance/twyla-tharps-50-years-of-forward-movement.html.

38. Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), pp. 80–83.

39. Simon Armitage, Oblique Strategies, BBC Radio 4, May 12, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02qncrt.

40. Carlos Alomar, interview by Simon Armitage for his documentary Oblique Strategies, BBC Radio 4, May 12, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02qncrt.

41. Carlos Alomar, speaking on the BBC TV documentary Five Years, May 25, 2013, available at http://artvod.com/music/david-bowie-five-years-documentary/.

42. Alomar, interview by Armitage, Oblique Strategies.

2. COLLABORATION

1. Ben Hunt-Davis and Harriet Beveridge, Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? (Kibworth Beauchamp, England: Matador, 2011), pp. 38–39.

2. Ibid., p. 81.

3. Winston A. Reynolds, “The Burning Ships of Hernán Cortés,” Hispania 42, no. 3 (September 1959), pp. 317–324.

4. Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 49.

5. Bruce Schechter, My Brain Is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdős (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 182. Also see the Erdős Number Project at Oakland University: http://wwwp.oakland.edu/enp/. The Erdős number graph continues to evolve because mathematicians continue to publish research based on their collaborations with Erdős, crediting him as a coauthor.

6. Jukka-Pekka Onnela et al., “Analysis of a Large-Scale Weighted Network of One-to-One Human Communication,” February 19, 2007, arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0702158.pdf.

7. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973), pp. 1360–1380, and his Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

8. Schechter, My Brain Is Open, pp. 176–177.

9. Ibid., p. 195.

10. Mathijs de Vaan, David Stark, and Balázs Vedres, “Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity,” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 4 (January 2015).

11. Author interview with Balázs Vedres, June 8, 2015.

12. Except where otherwise stated, descriptions of the Robbers Cave experiment are from Muzafer Sherif et al., The Robbers Cave Experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

13. Gary Alan Fine, “Forgotten Classic: The Robbers Cave Experiment,” Sociological Forum 19, no. 4 (December 2004), DOI: 10.1007/s11206-004-0704-7.

14. The study is described in Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), pp. 81–83.

15. Irving L. Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).

16. The Asch experiments are often known as the “conformity” experiments, although most subjects did not conform every time. However, given the fact that the group members—actors working for Solomon Asch—were clearly wrong, it is striking that people conformed at all. See S. E. Asch, “Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs 70, no. 9 (1956), pp. 1–70; and Christian Jarrett, “Textbook Coverage of This Classic Social Psychology Study Has Become Increasingly Biased,” BPS Research Digest, March 25, 2015, http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/03/textbook-coverage-of-this-classic.html.

17. Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

18. Scott Page, interview by Claudia Dreifus, “In Professor’s Model, Diversity = Productivity,” The New York Times, January 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/science/08conv.html?_r=1&.

19. Samuel R. Sommers, “On Racial Diversity and Group Decision Making: Identifying Multiple Effects of Racial Composition on Jury Deliberations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 4 (April 2006), pp. 597–612, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.90.4.597.

20. D. L. Loyd, C. S. Wang, K. W. Phillips, and R. B. Lount, Jr., “Social Category Diversity Promotes Premeeting Elaboration: The Role of Relationship Focus,” Organization Science 24, no. 3 (2013), pp. 757–772. See also the discussion in Katherine W. Phillips and Evan P. Appelbaum, “Reinterpreting the Effects of Group Diversity,” in Margaret A. Neale and Elizabeth A. Mannix, Looking Back, Moving Forward: A Review of Group and Team-Based Research (Bingley, England: Emerald, 2012), pp. 185–209.

21. Katherine W. Phillips, Katie A. Liljenquist, and Margaret A. Neale, “Is the Pain Worth the Gain? The Advantages and Liabilities of Agreeing with Socially Distinct Newcomers,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 35, no. 3 (March 2009), pp. 336–350.

22. Brooke Harrington, Pop Finance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

23. Ibid., p. 58.

24. Ibid., p. 133.

25. P. Ingram and M. W. Morris, “Do People Mix at Mixers? Structure, Homophily, and the ‘Life of the Party,’” Administrative Science Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2007), pp. 558–585. For a discussion, also see Jonah Lehrer, “Opposites Don’t Attract (and That’s Bad News),” Wired, January 6, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/01/opposites-dont-attract-and-thats-bad-news/.

26. Howard Aldrich and Martha A. Martinez-Firestone, “Why Aren’t Entrepreneurs More Creative? Conditions Affecting Creativity and Innovation in Entrepreneurial Activity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship, ed. Christina Shalley, Michael A. Hitt, and Jing Zhou, June 2015, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199927678.013.0026. For a useful discussion, see Keith Sawyer, “Why Aren’t Entrepreneurs More Creative?” https://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/why-arent-entrepreneurs-more-creative/.

27. A. J. Bahns, K. M. Pickett, and C. S. Crandall, “Social Ecology of Similarity: Big Schools, Small Schools and Social Relationships,” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, DOI: 10.1177/1368430211410751.

28. Jeremy Greenwood, Nezih Guner, Georgi Kocharkov, and Cezar Santos, “Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality,” NBER Working Paper No. 19829, January 2014, www.nber.org/papers/W19829.

29. Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

30. On this point, see Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

31. Nick Bilton, “Ferguson Reveals a Twitter Loop,” The New York Times, August 28, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/fashion/ferguson-reveals-a-twitter-loop.html?_r=0.

32. Emma Pierson, “See How Red Tweeters and Blue Tweeters Ignore Each Other on Ferguson,” Quartz, November 25, 2014, http://qz.com/302616/see-how-red-tweeters-and-blue-tweeters-ignore-eachother-on-ferguson/; and Pierson’s FAQ on the study, “Ferguson FAQ,” Obsession with Regression (blog), November 27, 2014, http://obsessionwithregression.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/ferguson-faq.html. A larger study of political tweeting also found similar “echo chamber” characteristics: Yosh Halberstam and Brian Knight, “Homophily, Group Size, and the Diffusion of Political Information in Social Networks: Evidence from Twitter,” NBER Working Paper No. 20681, November 2014, http://www.nber.org/papers/w20681 DOI 10.3386/w20681.

33. Author interview with Balázs Vedres, June 8, 2015.

34. Author interview with Mathijs de Vaan, June 8, 2015.

35. William Fotheringham, “Dave Brailsford Hails Team Sky Rethink for Chris Froome’s Tour de France Win,” The Guardian, July 27, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/jul/27/dave-brailsford-team-sky-chris-froome-tour-de-france-2015-win.

36. Remarks made by Dave Brailsford at a conference in November 2015 at which the author was present.

3. WORKPLACES

1. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. 163–166, 178.

2. Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (London: Bantam, 2014), chap. 2.

3. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (London: Little, Brown, 2011), p. 486.

4. Ibid., pp. 430–432.

5. The first Ed Catmull quotation is from Isaacson, Steve Jobs, p. 430. The second is from Catmull with Wallace, Creativity, Inc., p. ix.

6. Isaacson, Steve Jobs, pp. 430–432.

7. Julie Jargon, “Neatness Counts at Kyocera and at Others in the 5S Club: Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize, Sustain; Getting Mr. Scovie to Go Through His Boxes,” The Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2008, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122505999892670159.

8. S. Alexander Haslam and Craig Knight, “Cubicle, Sweet Cubicle,” Scientific American Mind, September/October 2010. Also author interview with Craig Knight, July 29, 2015.

9. Jargon, “Neatness Counts at Kyocera.”

10. T George Harris, “Psychology of the New York Work Space,” New York, October 31, 1977, pp. 51–55.

11. Robert Sommer, Tight Space: Hard Architecture and How to Humanize It (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974); Sommer’s work is neatly summarized by Harris, “Psychology of the New York Work Space,” pp. 51–55.

12. Jargon, “Neatness Counts at Kyocera.”

13. Alex Haslam and Craig Knight, “Your Place or Mine?” BBC News, November 17, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/6155438.stm.

14. This and the following rules are from a 2012 internal BHP Billiton document, “City Square: Work Environment Guidelines, Frequently Asked Questions,” via the Australian Financial Review website: http://www.afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/07/08/Photos/09a66320-c8cb-11e1-a18b-e5c71f70dca5_BHP_City_Square.pdf.

15. Frank Duffy, The New Office (London: Conran Octopus, 1997), p. 197.

16. For my account of the goings-on at Chiat/Day, I have relied heavily on Warren Berger’s magnificent feature article for Wired, “Lost in Space,” February 1, 1999, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/7.02/chiat_pr.html.

17. Scott Adams, Dilbert, January 10, 1995.

18. Useful resources on Building 20 include: Alex Beam, “A Building with Soul,” The Boston Globe, June 29, 1988; Jonah Lehrer, “Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all; “A Last, Loving Look at an MIT Landmark—Building 20,” RLE Undercurrents 9, no. 2 (Fall 1997), http://www.rle.mit.edu/media/undercurrents/Vol9_2_Spring97.pdf; Philip J. Hilts, “Last Rites for a ‘Plywood Palace’ That Was a Rock of Science,” The New York Times, March 31, 1998, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/31/science/last-rites-for-a-plywood-palace-that-was-a-rock-of-science.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm; Eve Downing, “Letting Go,” Spectrum (Spring 1998), http://spectrum.mit.edu/articles/letting-go/; and Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 25th Anniversary Edition (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010).

19. A lovely half-hour documentary, “Building 20: The Magical Incubator” was made by MIT in 1998. It’s tape T1217 in the MIT archives, online at: http://teachingexcellence.mit.edu/from-the-vault/mits-building-20-the-magical-incubator-1998; a definitive account of the merits of Building 20 is in chapter three of Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Viking, 1994).

20. Robert Campbell, “Dizzying Heights in Frank Gehry’s Remarkable New Stata Center at MIT, Crazy Angles Have a Serious Purpose,” The Boston Globe, April 25, 2004.

21. Robin Pogrebin and Katie Zezima, “M.I.T. Sues Frank Gehry, Citing Flaws in Center He Designed,” The New York Times, November 7, 2007. See also Spencer Reiss, “Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace,” Wired (May 2004), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/mit.html.

22. Reiss, “Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace.”

23. Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), p. 32.

24. Ibid., pp. 34, 125.

25. Ibid., p. 126.

26. Ibid., p. 129.

27. Ibid.

28. “Inside the Box: How Workers Ended Up in Cubes—and How They Could Break Free,” The Economist, January 3, 2015; John Wetzel, “The Action Office: The Secret History of the Cubicle,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgDHifV62WI; Nikil Saval, “The Cubicle You Call Hell Was Designed to Set You Free,” Wired, April 23, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/04/how-offices-accidentally-became-hellish-cubicle-farms/.

29. Robert Propst, The Office: A Facility Based on Change (Elmhurst, IL: The Business Press, 1968), p. 27.

30. Harris, “Psychology of the New York Work Space,” pp. 51–55.

31. The Business Etiquette Handbook, 1965, p. 17.

32. Author interview with Craig Knight, July 29, 2015.

33. A. K. Korman, Organizational Behavior (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1977), p. 181.

34. Catmull with Wallace, Creativity, Inc., p. 301.

35. Ibid., p. 303.

36. Ibid., p. 3.

37. Ibid., p. x.

4. IMPROVISATION

1. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994), p. 9.

2. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Vintage: London, 1993), p. 35; Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound, p. 16.

3. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 20.

4. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 49.

5. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 55.

6. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 56, has a detailed account of Dr. King’s routine for writing a sermon. The recollections of Dr. King’s assistant John Thomas Porter are on p. 50.

7. Mark Hemingway, Twitter account @Heminator, September 22, 2011, https://twitter.com/Heminator/status/117063712136904704.

8. Ewen MacAskill, “Rick Perry Forgets Agency He Wants to Scrap in Republican Debate Disaster,” The Guardian, November 9, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/10/rick-perry-forgets-agency-scrap.

9. “Ed Miliband: I Forgot Parts of My Speech,” The Daily Telegraph, September 24, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11117748/Ed-Miliband-I-forgot-parts-of-my-speech.html.

10. Tim Harford and Emma Jacobs, “Regrets? I’ve Had a Few,” FT Magazine, June 4, 2011, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8817953e-8bf1-11e0-854c-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OIHMeKJu.

11. Fred Laico, interview by Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (London: Granta Books, 2000), p. 75.

12. Quoted in Kahn, Kind of Blue, p. 105.

13. See Richard Williams, The Blue Moment (London: Faber & Faber, 2009), which charts the influence of Kind of Blue.

14. Quotes from Quincy Jones and Chick Corea from Kahn, Kind of Blue, pp. 20, 178.

15. Bill Evans’s liner notes for Kind of Blue compare the album to a Japanese style of painting in which the artist cannot hesitate for a moment without ruining the effect. “Miles conceived these settings only hours before the recording dates,” Evans explains, although that is not quite true. Both Bill Evans and arranger Gil Evans seem to have had a hand in composing certain pieces, and band members recalled trying some of the arrangements at live gigs.

16. Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), p. 235.

17. Mark Lewisohn, The Complete Beatles Chronicle: The Definitive Day-by-Day Guide to the Beatles’ Entire Career (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1992), p. 253.

18. Charles Limb, “Your Brain on Improv,” TEDxMidAtlantic Talk, November 2010, https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv/.

19. See, for example: A. Pinho, O. Manzano, P. Fransson, H. Eriksson, and F. Ullén, “Connecting to Create: Expertise in Musical Improvisation Is Associated with Increased Functional Connectivity Between Premotor and Prefrontal Areas,” The Journal of Neuroscience 34 (April 30, 2014), DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769-13.2014; A. Berkowitz and D. Ansari, “Expertise-Related Deactivation of the Right Temporoparietal Junction During Musical Improvisation,” Neuroimage 49 (2010), DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.08.042.

20. Charles Limb and Allen Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 2 (February 27, 2008), DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001679.

21. Author interview with Charles Limb, October 24, 2014.

22. S. Liu, H. M. Chow, Y. Xu, M. Erkinnen, K. Swett, M. Eagle, D. Rizik-Baer, and A. Braun, “Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap,” Scientific Reports 2:835, DOI: 10.1038/srep00834.

23. Author interview with Charles Limb, October 24, 2014. A similar perspective can be found in Aaron Berkowitz, The Improvising Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 143, which endorses Limb’s view that the brain’s systems for monitoring and correction seem to be suppressed during musical improvisation.

24. Author telephone interview with Nicola Green, October 28, 2014. Many articles covered the social media responses at the time, for example: Alex Hern, “When Life Gave O2 Network Failure It Made Networkfailureade on Twitter,” New Statesman, July 12, 2012, http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/alex-hern/2012/07/when-life-gave-o2-network-failure-it-made-networkfailureade-twitter.

25. Kate Krader, interview by Ben Schott for The Art of the Menu, BBC Radio 4, September 29, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04jjz3v. The restaurant in question was 11 Madison Park.

26. Max Chafkin, “The Zappos Way of Managing,” Inc., May 1, 2009, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090501/the-zappos-way-of-managing.html; Armando Roggio, “The Zappos Effect,” Practical Ecommerce, March 21, 2011, http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/2662-The-Zappos-Effect-5-Great-Customer-Service-Ideas-for-Smaller-Businesses; Ben Popken, “Zappos Saves Best Man from Going Barefoot at Wedding,” Consumerist, May 19, 2011, http://consumerist.com/2011/05/19/zappos-saves-best-man-from-going-barefoot-at-wedding/.

27. Nat Hentoff, “An Afternoon with Miles Davis,” The Jazz Review, December 1958, pp. 11–12.

28. Quoted in Patricia Ryan Madson, Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up (New York: Bell Tower, 2005), p. 28.

29. “Magic Words,” This American Life, episode 532, http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/532/transcript.

30. M. Neal and P. Barton Wright, “Validation Therapy for Dementia,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2003 (3): CD001394, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12917907.

31. Gilbert Ryle, “Improvisation,” Mind 85, no. 337 (January 1976), pp. 69–83.

32. Harford and Jacobs, “Regrets? I’ve Had a Few.”

33. Carl Czerny, Letters to a Young Lady on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte, from the Earliest Rudiments to the Highest Stage of Cultivation (Vienna, 1839), trans. J. A. Hamilton (New York: Firth, Pond, 1851), pp. 74–77.

34. Jimmy Cobb, interview by Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue, p. 79.

35. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, pp. 64–68; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, pp. 17–23.

36. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 23; Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, p. 69; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), p. 138.

37. Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 138–142; James Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), pp. 22–29, contains insightful commentary on the speech and what it tells us about the nature of leadership.

38. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 282; Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, pp. 256–259; Branch, Parting the Waters, pp. 878–882.

39. Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 882.

5. WINNING

1. David Fraser, Knight’s Cross: A Life of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (London: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 39.

2. “A Sinister Advantage,” The Economist, December 9, 2004, http://www.economist.com/node/3471297.

3. Monte Cox, “Southpaws: Doing It Right the Wrong Way,” Fightbeat/Fightworld, May 2005, republished at http://coxscorner.tripod.com/southpaws.html.

4. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over (New York: Dutton, 2013), pp. 101–104; Jonathan Rowson, “Carlsen: The Nettlesome World Champion,” The Herald, December 29, 2013; republished on Chessbase at http://en.chessbase.com/post/carlsen-the-nettlesome-world-champion.

5. Author interview with Guy Haworth, December 9, 2014.

6. Fraser, Knight’s Cross, pp. 62–67.

7. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (London: Corgi, 2014), p. 25.

8. Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (London: Random House, 2000), pp. 82, 87.

9. Stone, The Everything Store, pp. 56–58.

10. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

11. Ibid., p. 203.

12. Ibid., p. 114.

13. Ibid., p. 122.

14. Ibid., pp. 131, 143.

15. Ibid., p. 117.

16. Ibid., pp. 213–225.

17. Erwin Rommel, letter to Lucie Rommel, February 26, 1941, in David Irving, Rommel: The Trail of the Fox (Ware, England: Wordsworth Military Library, 1999), p. 63. I hesitate to cite David Irving. His later work was discredited in a high-profile libel trial; he was eventually sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for the crime of denying the Holocaust. However, his biography of Rommel continues to be cited by serious historians.

18. Fraser, Knight’s Cross, pp. 228–231.

19. Ibid., pp. 232, 235.

20. Ibid., p. 5; Daniel Allen Butler, Field Marshal: The Life and Death of Erwin Rommel (Oxford, England: Casemate, 2015), p. 218.

21. “Donald Trump Under Fire for Mocking Disabled Reporter,” BBC News, November 26, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34930042.

22. Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002), pp. 329–330.

23. Ibid., p. 332.

24. Josh Marshall, “The William T. Sherman of Crazy,” Talking Points Memo, August 27, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-william-t-sherman-of-crazy; also see his follow-up, “The Way of the Doofus Warrior,” August 28, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-way-of-the-doofus-warrior.

25. Fraser, Knight’s Cross, p. 271.

26. David Kirkpatrick, “Barnes & Noble’s Jekyll and Hyde,” New York, July 19, 1999, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/bizfinance/biz/features/47/.

27. Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, p. 133.

28. Stone, The Everything Store, p. 87.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., p. 80.

31. Stefanie Olsen, “FTC Fines E-tailers $1.5 Million for Shipping Delays,” CNET News, July 26, 2000, http://news.cnet.com/FTC-fines-e-tailers-1.5-million-for-shipping-delays/2100-1017_3-243684.html.

32. Stone, The Everything Store, p. 315.

33. Ibid., pp. 316–317.

34. Ken Auletta, “Paper Trail,” The New Yorker, June 25, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/25/paper-trail-2.

35. Leslie Hook, “Amazon Cloud Service Key to Sustaining Profitability,” Financial Times, January 26, 2016, https://next.ft.com/content/d837a4f6-c390-11e5-b3b1-7b2481276e45.

36. Result of a search on Amazon.com conducted January 9, 2015.

37. “Amazon Japan ‘Co-Operating’ with Tokyo Police After Raid,” BBC News, January 27, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31000904; “Islamic State Magazine Dabiq Withdrawn from Sale by Amazon,” BBC News, June 6, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-33035453.

38. Tim Maly, “Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel,” Quiet Babylon (blog), http://quietbabylon.com/2013/algorithmic-rape-jokes-in-the-library-of-babel/.

39. Henry Blodget, “I Asked Jeff Bezos the Tough Questions,” Business Insider, December 13, 2014, http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12.

40. Marcus Wohlsen, “Amazon Could Finally Grow Its Profits—By Selling Other People’s Stuff,” Wired, January 5, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/01/secret-amazon-finally-making-profit-selling-peoples-stuff/.

41. “The Best Performing CEOs in the World,” Harvard Business Review, November 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/11/the-best-performing-ceos-in-the-world.

42. Gavin Mortimer, The SAS in World War II (Oxford: Osprey, 2011), p. 10.

43. Virginia Cowles, The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment (1958; Barnsley, England: Pen and Sword Books, 2010), pp. 12–15; Gavin Mortimer, Stirling’s Men: The Inside History of the SAS in World War II (London: Cassell, 2005), pp. 10–11.

44. Alan Deutschman, “Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos,” Fast Company, August 1, 2004, http://www.fastcompany.com/50541/inside-mind-jeff-bezos.

45. Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, p. 371.

46. Mortimer, Stirling’s Men, p. 28; Mortimer, The SAS in World War II, pp. 25–31.

47. Cowles, The Phantom Major, pp. 60–66.

48. Ibid., pp. 71–72.

49. Quoted ibid., p. 97.

50. Cowles, The Phantom Major, pp. 98–103.

51. Mortimer, Stirling’s Men, pp. 56–57; Cowles, The Phantom Major, pp. 178–180.

52. Mortimer, Stirling’s Men, pp. 59–62; Cowles, The Phantom Major, pp. 200, 205–208.

53. Fraser, Knight’s Cross, pp. 534–552. The detail about the wreath is from Irving, Rommel: The Trail of the Fox, pp. 402–405.

6. INCENTIVES

1. Isabel Oakeshott, “Mother Catches Out Blair over GPs,” Evening Standard, April 29, 2005, http://www.standard.co.uk/news/mother-catches-out-blair-over-gps-7272924.html; Nicholas Timmins, “Blair Bemused over GP Waiting Times,” Financial Times, April 30, 2005, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/483307e2-b915-11d9-bfeb-00000e2511c8.html#axzz3l572UdzP.

2. For details about Beckmann and the scientific forestry project, see Henry E. Lowood, “The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany,” chap. 11 in Tore Frangsmyr, J. L. Heilbron, and Robin Rider, eds., The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft6d5nb455/. Chris Maser, in The Redesigned Forest (San Pedro, CA: R. & E. Miles, 1988), gives more details of the fate of German forests, including extensive reports of Richard Plochman’s conclusions, drawn in 1968. I owe a great debt to James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) for alerting me to the story of German forestry and to its wider implications.

3. Brian M. Casey, Donald D. McIntire, and Kenneth J. Leveno, “The Continuing Value of the Apgar Score for the Assessment of Newborn Infants,” New England Journal of Medicine 344 (February 15, 2001), pp. 467–471, DOI: 10.1056/NEJM200102153440701.

4. Atul Gawande, “The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/09/the-score.

5. David Dranove, Daniel Kessler, Mark McClellan, and Mark Satterthwaite, “Is More Information Better? The Effects of ‘Report Cards’ on Health Care Providers,” Journal of Political Economy 111, no. 3 (2003), pp. 555–588.

6. Melissa Korn and Rachel Louise Ensign, “Colleges Rise as They Reject: Schools Invite More Applications, Then Use Denials to Boost Coveted Rankings,” The Wall Street Journal, December 25, 2012, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324731304578189282282976640; Max Kutner, “How to Game the College Rankings,” Boston Magazine, September 2014, http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/.

7. Stephen Burd and Rachel Fishman, “Ten Ways Colleges Work You Over,” Washington Monthly, September/October 2014, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2014/features/ten_ways_colleges_work_you_ove051760.php.

8. Paul Jump, “Twenty per cent Contracts Rise in Run-up to REF,” Times Higher Education, September 26, 2013, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/twenty-per-cent-contracts-rise-in-run-up-to-ref/2007670.article; Chris Bertram, “Research Excellence Framework: The Denouement,” Crooked Timber, December 18, 2014, http://crookedtimber.org/2014/12/18/research-excellence-framework-the-denouement/.

9. Alan Beattie, “Development: Crumbs of Comfort,” Financial Times, September 15, 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f575ec76-c0f8-11df-99c4-00144feab49a.html#axzz3AvlCdxTN.

10. Steven Kerr, “On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B,” Academy of Management Journal 18, no. 4 (December 1975), pp. 769–783, http://www.jstor.org/stable/255378.

11. Peter Smith, “On the Unintended Consequences of Publishing Performance Data in the Public Sector,” International Journal of Public Administration 18, no. 2–3 (1995), pp. 277–310, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01900699508525011.

12. Harvey Goldstein and David Spiegelhalter, “League Tables and Their Limitations: Statistical Issues in Comparisons of Institutional Performance,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 159, no. 3 (1996), DOI: 10.2307/2983325.

13. Gwyn Bevan and Richard Hamblin, “Hitting and Missing Targets by Ambulance Services for Emergency Calls: Effects of Different Systems of Performance Measurement Within the UK,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A 172, no. 1 (2009), pp. 161–190.

14. “History of the Basel Committee,” Bank for International Settlements, last modified October 1, 2015, http://www.bis.org/bcbs/history.htm; Charles Goodhart, The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision: A History of the Early Years 1974–1997 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

15. Josef Korte and Sascha Steffen, “A ‘Sovereign Subsidy’—Zero Risk Weights and Sovereign Risk Spillovers,” VoxEU.org, September 7, 2014, http://www.voxeu.org/article/sovereign-subsidy-zero-risk-weights-and-sovereign-risk-spillovers.

16. Andrew Haldane and Vasileios Madouros, “The Dog and the Frisbee,” Bank of England Speech 596, given August 31, 2012, http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/speeches/2012/speech596.pdf. Also author interview with Andy Haldane, May 16, 2015.

17. I. McCammon and P. Hageli, “An Evaluation of Rule-Based Decision Tools for Travel in Avalanche Terrain,” Cold Regions Science and Technology 47 (2007), pp. 193–206.

18. Julian N. Marewski and Gerd Gigerenzer, “Heuristic Decision Making in Medicine,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14, no. 1 (March 2012), pp. 77–89; Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious (New York: Viking, 2007).

19. Lee A. Green and Mark P. Becker, “Physician Decision Making and Variation in Hospital Admission Rates for Suspected Acute Cardiac Ischemia: A Tale of Two Towns,” Medical Care 32, no. 11 (November 1994), pp. 1086–1097.

20. Victor DeMiguel, Lorenzo Garlappi, and Raman Uppal, “Optimal Versus Naive Diversification: How Inefficient Is the 1/N Portfolio Strategy?” The Review of Financial Studies 22, no. 5 (2009), pp. 1915–1953.

21. Jeremy Bentham, Constitutional Code (London: R. Heward, 1830), vol. 1, chap. IX, §16, Art 60.1, cited in Florian Ederer, Richard Holden, and Margaret Meyer, “Gaming and Strategic Ambiguity in Incentive Provision,” Oxford University Department of Economics Working Paper Number 640, January 2013.

22. Tom Braithwaite, “Banks Strive to Weather the Fed’s Stress Test Storms,” Financial Times, February 24, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4db4b096-9d66-11e3-a599-00144feab7de.html#ixzz3mSGcZY25; see also Paul Glasserman and Gowtham Tangirala, “Are the Federal Reserve’s Stress Test Results Predictable?” Office of Financial Research Working Paper 15-02, March 3, 2015.

23. Author interview with Andy Haldane, May 16, 2015.

24. Gwyn Bevan and Christopher Hood, “Targets, Inspections, and Transparency: Too Much Predictability in the Name of Transparency Weakens Control,” British Medical Journal 328, no. 7440 (March 13, 2004), p. 598, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.328.7440.598; Sir Andrew Dilnot and Sir David Spiegelhalter both advocated the use of randomly chosen measures in personal conversations with the author.

25. “The Volkswagen Scandal: A Mucky Business,” The Economist, September 26, 2015, http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21667918-systematic-fraud-worlds-biggest-carmaker-threatens-engulf-entire-industry-and; Brad Plumer, “Volkswagen’s Appalling Clean Diesel Scandal Explained,” Vox, September 23, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9365667/volkswagen-clean-diesel-recall-passenger-cars; “Clean Air Act Diesel Engine Cases,” US Department of Justice, May 14, 2015, http://www.justice.gov/enrd/diesel-engines; Jeff Plungis and Dana Hull, “VW’s Emissions Cheating Found by Curious Clean-Air Group,” Bloomberg, September 20, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-19/volkswagen-emissions-cheating-found-by-curious-clean-air-group.

7. AUTOMATION

1. Jeff Wise, “What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447,” Popular Mechanics, December 6, 2011, http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a3115/what-really-happened-aboard-air-france-447-6611877/; William Langewiesche, “The Human Factor,” Vanity Fair, October 2014, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-flight-447-crash; “Air France Flight 447 and the Safety Paradox of Automated Cockpits,” Slate, June 25, 2015; “Children of the Magenta,” 99% Invisible (podcast), June 23, 2015, http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/.

2. William Langewiesche, speaking on “Children of the Magenta,” 99% Invisible (podcast), http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/children-of-the-magenta-automation-paradox-pt-1/.

3. Robert Charette, “Automated to Death,” IEEE Spectrum, December 15, 2009, http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/automated-to-death; for details about AirAsia 8501, also see Jeff Wise, “AirAsia Flight 8501 Crash Reveals the Dangers of Putting Machines in the Driver’s Seat,” New York, December 2, 2015, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/airasia-flight-8501-and-the-risks-of-automation.html.

4. James Reason, Human Error (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 180.

5. Mike M. Ahlers, “Pilots of Wayward Jet Lose Licenses,” CNN, October 28, 2009, http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/10/27/airliner.fly.by/index.html.

6. Cited in Langewiesche, “The Human Factor.”

7. Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac, “How a ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, September 2, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/.

8. “Man in Bradford Traffic Queue Given Parking Ticket,” BBC News, February 6, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-26074514; “Motorist Slapped with Parking Ticket While Waiting in Traffic Queue,” Daily Mirror, February 7, 2014, http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bradford-council-slap-motorist-victor-3120354.

9. Ian J. Goodfellow, Yaroslav Bulatov, Julian Ibarz, Sacha Arnoud, and Vinay Shet, “Multi-digit Number Recognition from Street View Imagery Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” December 20, 2013, http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6082; see also “How Google Cracked House Number Identification in Street View,” Technology Review, January 6, 2014, http://www.technology review.com/view/523326/how-google-cracked-house-number-identification-in-street-view/.

10. Natasha Singer, “When No One Is Just a Face in the Crowd,” The New York Times, February 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/technology/when-no-one-is-just-a-face-in-the-crowd.html?_r=3.

11. See David Kravets, “FBI Checks Wrong Box, Places Student on No-Fly List,” Wired, February 6, 2014, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2014/02/no-fly-list-bungle/, and, for much more detail, the judge’s ruling, posted at http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2014/02/ibraruling.pdf.

12. Pam Dixon, “What Information Do Data Brokers Have on Consumers?” Congressional Testimony, December 18, 2013, http://www.worldprivacyforum.org/2013/12/testimony-what-information-do-data-brokers-have-on-consumers/.

13. See Frank Pasquale, Black Box Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), and Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016).

14. Akiko Fujita, “Tracking Disaster: Japanese Tourists Drive Straight into the Pacific,” ABC News, March 16, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/-tracking-disaster-japanese-tourists-drive-straight-into-the-pacific/. Also see Lauren Hansen, “8 Drivers Who Blindly Followed GPS into Disaster,” The Week, May 7, 2013, http://theweek.com/articles/464674/8-drivers-who-blindly-followed-gps-into-disaster.

15. Richard Thaler, Misbehaving (London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2015).

16. Gary Klein, Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (London: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 118–119.

17. Sarah O’Connor, “Leave the Robotic Jobs to Robots and Improve Humans’ Lives,” Financial Times, January 5, 2016, https://next.ft.com/content/da557b66-b09c-11e5-993b-c425a3d2b65a.

18. Klein, Streetlights and Shadows, pp. 123–124.

19. “Will Self-Driving Cars Spell the End of the American Road Trip?” 99% Invisible (podcast), available on The Eye: Slate’s Design Blog, July 3, 2015, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2015/07/03/self_driving_cars_and_the_paradox_of_automation_from_99_invisible.html. Raj Rajkumar’s comments below are from the same podcast.

20. Jack Stewart, “What May Be Self-Driving Cars’ Biggest Problem,” BBC Future, August 25, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150824-what-may-be-self-driving-cars-biggest-problem.

21. Cited in Langewiesche, “The Human Factor.”

22. M. L. Cummings, C. Mastracchio, K. M. Thornburg, and A. Mkrtchyan, “Boredom and Distraction in Multiple Unmanned Vehicle Supervisory Control,” Interacting with Computers 25, no. 1 (2013), pp. 34–47, http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86942.

23. Tom Vanderbilt, “The Traffic Guru,” The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2008.

24. Ibid.

25. Simon Jenkins, “The Removal of Road Markings Is to Be Celebrated. We Are Safer Without Them,” The Guardian, February 4, 2016, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/removal-road-markings-safer-fewer-accidents-drivers.

8. RESILIENCE

1. Michael Specter, “Germs Are Us,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/germs-are-us.

2. Michael Pollan, “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs,” The New York Times Magazine, May 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html.

3. The most widely reported estimate is that the microbial cells in our body outnumber our own cells ten to one. This is a guess. We do not know to within two orders of magnitude how many cells there are in the human body. Peter Andrey Smith calls the ten-to-one ratio “a crude estimate from 1972 that established itself as a fact through repetition.” Smith reports on more recent work and suggests a range between 1 to 1 and 100 to 1. All that suggests that while enormously uncertain, the crude estimate from 1972 is holding up quite well. “Is Your Body Mostly Microbes? Actually, We Have No Idea,” The Boston Globe, September 14, 2014, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/09/13/your-body-mostly-microbes-actually-have-idea/qlcoKot4wfUXecjeVaFKFN/story.html.

4. See Martin Blaser, Missing Microbes (New York: Henry Holt, 2014), p. 35, for a discussion of the correlation between microbiome diversity and obesity. The UC San Francisco research is described in Specter, “Germs Are Us”; the University of Toronto research—published in Ruth Brown et al., “Secular Differences in the Association Between Caloric Intake, Macronutrient Intake, and Physical Activity with Obesity,” Obesity Research and Clinical Practice, September 14, 2015, pii: S1871-403X(15)00121-0, DOI: 10.1016/j.orcp.2015.08.007—is described in “Why It Was Easier to Be Skinny in the 1980s,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/why-it-was-easier-to-be-skinny-in-the-1980s/407974/.

5. “CDC Puts C Difficile Burden at 453,000 Cases, 29,000 Deaths,” University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, February 25, 2015, http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2015/02/cdc-puts-c-difficile-burden-453000-cases-29000-deaths.

6. Emily Eakin, “The Excrement Experiment,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/excrement-experiment; Freakonomics Radio, “The Power of Poop,” March 3, 2011, http://freakonomics.com/2011/03/03/the-power-of-poop-full-transcript/.

7. Emily Eakin, “Bacteria on the Brain,” The New Yorker, December 7, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/07/bacteria-on-the-brain.

8. This study was done by researchers at the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon. See Jessica Green, “Are We Filtering the Wrong Microbes?” TED Talks, 2011, http://www.ted.com/talks/jessica_green_are_we_filtering_the_wrong_microbes/transcript?language=en.

9. Alanna Collen, “‘Microbial Birthday Suit’ for C-Section Babies,” BBC Magazine, September 11, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34064012.

10. Blaser, Missing Microbes.

11. Ed Yong, “There Is No ‘Healthy’ Microbiome,” The New York Times, November 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/there-is-no-healthy-microbiome.html, and Gabrielle Canon, “Sorry, Your Gut Bacteria Are Not the Answer to All Your Health Problems,” Mother Jones, October 27, 2014, http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/10/microbiome-health-gut-bacteria; Blaser, Missing Microbes, pp. 31–32.

12. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 50.

13. Ibid., p. 193.

14. Maryann P. Feldman and David B. Audretsch, “Innovation in Cities: Science-Based Diversity, Specialization and Localized Competition,” European Economic Review 43 (1999).

15. AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

16. Cesar Hidalgo, How Information Grows (London: Allen Lane, 2015), chap. 9.

17. Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2005, famously demonstrated this effect using a simulation that is simple enough to run with nickels and dimes on a chessboard. In the simulation, the nickels don’t want to be surrounded by dimes and the dimes don’t want to be surrounded by nickels, but both are happy with a mix of neighbors. Schelling showed that as one or two surrounded coins moved to a new place on the board, a cascade could begin, leading to total segregation. For more about the Schelling model, see my book The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World (New York: Random House, 2008).

18. Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing, The Big Sort (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). For the data on the 2012 election, see Alan Greenblatt, “The ‘Politics of Self-Expression’ Increasingly Divides Americans,” Governing, December 26, 2014, http://www.governing.com/topics/politics/gov-american-politics-gets-sorted-by-tribe.html.

19. Jonathan Rothwell, “Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools,” Brookings Institution policy paper (2012), http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012/4/19-school-inequality-rothwell/0419_school_inequality_rothwell.pdf.

20. Diederik Stapel, Faking Science: A True Story of Academic Fraud, trans. Nicholas J. L. Brown, available for download, http://nick.brown.free.Fr./stapel/FakingScience-20141214.pdf, p. 112.

21. Diederik A. Stapel and Siegwart Lindenberg, “Coping with Chaos: How Disordered Contexts Promote Stereotyping and Discrimination,” Science 332, no. 6026 (April 8, 2011), pp. 251–253, DOI: 10.1126/science.1201068.

22. Stapel, Faking Science, p. 113.

23. Ibid., p. 103.

24. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, “The Mind of a Con Man,” The New York Times Magazine, April 28, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.

25. George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic Monthly, March 1982, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/03/broken-windows/304465/.

26. “What Broken Windows Policing Is,” The Economist, January 27, 2015, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/01/economist-explains-18.

27. Kelling and Wilson, “Broken Windows.”

28. Steven D. Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors That Explain the Decline and Six That Do Not,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, no. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 163–190. For the fifth explanation, focusing on removal of lead from gasoline, see Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, “Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime,” The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 7, no. 1 (2007), Article 51, http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/vol7/iss1/art51.

29. Bernard E. Harcourt and David E. Thacher, “Is Broken Windows Policing Broken?” Legal Affairs, October 17, 2005, http://legalaffairs.org/webexclusive/debateclub_broken windows1005.msp.

30. Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush, “Seeing Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows,’” Social Psychology Quarterly 67, no. 4 (December 2004), pp. 319–342.

31. For a description of the situation of Jewish scientists and mathematicians in Germany, and the discrimination they suffered even before the Nazi ascendancy, see Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (London: Penguin, 1999), especially chap. 3.

32. Constance Reid, Hilbert (New York: Springer, 1996), p. 205.

33. Fabian Waldinger, “Bombs, Brains and Science: The Role of Human and Physical Capital for the Creation of Scientific Knowledge,” working paper, University of Warwick, March 7, 2015; The Review of Economics and Statistics, November 16, 2015, http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00565#.VwbCa7dIir8; an earlier-dated version is available at http://www.dal.ca/content/dam/dalhousie/pdf/faculty/science/economics/seminars/Waldinger-Bombs-Brains.pdf.

34. “Donald J. Trump Statement on Preventing Muslim Immigration,” December 7, 2015, https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-preventing-muslim-immigration.

35. Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, “The Economic Value of Cultural Diversity: Evidence from US Cities,” NBER Working Paper No. 10904, November 2004, http://www.nber.org/papers/w10904.

9. LIFE

1. Franklin’s discussion of his virtue journal is in Part Two of his autobiography (New York: Henry Holt, 1916 ed.), available online at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20203.

2. John Bach McMaster, as quoted ibid., n. 70.

3. Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind (London: Penguin, 2015).

4. Merlin Mann, “Inbox Zero,” talk delivered at Google Tech Talks, July 23, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9UjeTMb3Yk.

5. Jorge Luis Borges, “John Wilkins’ Analytical Language” (1942), Selected Non-Fictions, ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 231.

6. Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, A Perfect Mess (London: Orion, 2007), pp. 156–157.

7. Maria Popova, “Order, Disorder, and Oneself: French Polymath Paul Valéry on How to Never Misplace Anything,” Brain Pickings, October 30, 2015, https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/30/paul-valery-analects-order-disorder/.

8. Abrahamson and Freedman, A Perfect Mess, p. 159.

9. Steve Whittaker and Julia Hirschberg, “The Character, Value and Management of Personal Paper Archives,” ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction 8 (2001), pp. 150–170.

10. R. Boardman and M. A. Sasse, “‘Stuff Goes into the Computer and Doesn’t Come Out’: A Cross-Tool Study of Personal Information Management,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2004, pp. 583–590.

11. V. Bellotti, N. Ducheneaut, M. Howard, I. Smith, and R. Grinter, “Quality vs. Quantity: E-mail-Centric Task Management and Its Relationship with Overload,” Human-Computer Interaction 20, no. 1–2 (2005), pp. 89–138.

12. Steve Whittaker, Tara Matthews, Julian Cerutti, Hernan Badenes, and John Tang, “Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email? A Study of Email Refinding,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011.

13. Daniel S. Kirschenbaum, Laura L. Humphrey, Sheldon D. Malett, “Specificity of Planning in Adult Self-Control: An Applied Investigation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 40, no. 5 (1981), pp. 941–950. For the one-year follow-up, see Daniel S. Kirschenbaum, Laura L. Humphrey, Sheldon D. Malett, and Andrew Tomarken, “Specificity of Planning and the Maintenance of Self-Control: 1 Year Follow-Up of a Study Improvement Program,” Behavior Therapy 13 (1982), pp. 232–240.

14. Marc Andreessen, “Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity,” June 4, 2007, http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_personal_productivity.html.

15. Charlie LeDuff and John Broder, “Schwarzenegger, Confident and Ready for Prime Time,” The New York Times, June 24, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/us/schwarzenegger-confident-and-ready-for-prime-time.html?pagewanted=all; also see Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, A Perfect Mess (London: Orion, 2007), pp. 75–77, for discussion.

16. Dan Slater, Love in the Time of Algorithms (London: Current, 2013), p. 17.

17. The FiveThirtyEight website made a short documentary interviewing founders and customers of Operation Match: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-online-dating-was-like-in-the-1960s/.

18. Christian Rudder, “We Experiment on Human Beings!” OK Trends, July 28, 2014, http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/we-experiment-on-human-beings/.

19. Hannah Fry, The Mathematics of Love (London: TED Books, 2015), p. 44.

20. Kevin Poulsen, “How a Math Genius Hacked OkCupid to Find True Love,” Wired, January 21, 2014, http://www.wired.com/2014/01/how-to-hack-okcupid/.

21. Author interview with Michael Norton, February 1, 2016.

22. Jeana Frost, Zoe Chance, Michael Norton, and Dan Ariely, “People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating with Virtual Dates,” Journal of Interactive Marketing 22, no. 1 (2008).

23. Emma Jacobs, “A Heartfelt Mission to End Career Hookups,” Financial Times, September 4, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8c5d408a-2f63-11e4-a79c-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3pxipi4Dk.

24. “Paul Flowers at Treasury Select Committee,” BBC News, November 19, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24999781; Helen Warrell and Miles Johnson, “Ex-Co-op Bank Chairman Paul Flowers Charged with Drug Offenses,” Financial Times, April 16, 2014; Helen Pidd, “Former Co-op Bank Boss Paul Flowers Pleads Guilty to Drug Charges,” The Guardian, May 7, 2014.

25. Sharlene Goff and Emma Jacobs, “Psychometric Tests Led Co-op Bank to Make Paul Flowers Chairman,” Financial Times, January 28, 2014.

26. Gill Plimmer, “How to Cheat a Psychometric Test,” Financial Times, April 3, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/eeda84e4-b4f6-11e3-9166-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3pxipi4Dk.

27. Matt Novak, “Mechanical Matchmaking: The Science of Love in the 1920s,” Smithsonian, May 23, 2013, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mechanical-matchmaking-the-science-of-love-in-the-1920s-103877403/#Dl8eC83OzkKhyp75.99.

28. A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 59 (1950), pp. 433–460.

29. Brian Christian, The Most Human Human (London: Viking, 2011).

30. “This Really Happened, No Joke (I Got Caught Using Jealous Girlfriend Opener),” The Attraction Forums, http://www.theattractionforums.com/general-discussion/46830-really-happened-no-joke-i-got-caught-using-jealous-girlfriend-opener.html.

31. A full transcript of MGonz’s first interaction is on Mark Humphrys’s website: http://computing.dcu.ie/~humphrys/Eliza/eliza.anon.html, accessed November 3, 2011. See also Christian, The Most Human Human, pp. 36–37.

32. Dan Ariely, “Online Dating: Avoiding a Bad Equilibrium,” http://danariely.com/2010/09/20/online-dating-avoiding-a-bad-equilibrium/, accessed November 3, 2011.

33. Andrew Griffin, “Facebook Dislike Button Arrives—in the Form of Reaction Emoji,” The Independent, October 8, 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-dislike-button-arrives-in-the-form-of-reaction-emoji-a6686331.html.

34. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), p. 22.

35. James Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), chap. 3.

36. Matthew T. Bowers, B. Christine Green, Florian Hemme, and Laurence Chalip, “Assessing the Relationship Between Youth Sport Participation Settings and Creativity in Adulthood,” Creativity Research Journal 26, no. 3 (2014), DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2014.929420.

37. Peter Gray, Free to Learn (New York: Basic Books, 2013), chap. 8.

38. Erin Davis (director), The Land (2015), http://playfreemovie.com/.

39. Hanna Rosin, “The Overprotected Kid,” The Atlantic, April 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/04/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/.

40. Author interview with Tim Gill, November 5, 2015.

41. Cited in Tim Gill, No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007), p. 29.

42. Mariana Brussoni et al., “What Is the Relationship Between Risky Outdoor Play and Health in Children? A Systematic Review,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 12, no. 6 (June 8, 2015), pp. 6423–6454.

43. Helle Nebelong, speech at Designs on Play Conference, 2002, cited in Gill, No Fear, p. 35.

44. “Breaking Breaktime’s Rules,” The Economist: Babbage Blog, January 29, 2014, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2014/01/child-development.

45. Jared Diamond, “Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers,” Newsweek, December 12, 2012, excerpted from The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies (New York: Viking, 2012), http://www.newsweek.com/best-practices-raising-kids-look-hunter-gatherers-63611.