A decade ago, long before the financial calamity now sweeping the world, the federal government's economic brain trust heard a clarion warning and declared in unison: You're wrong.

What Went Wrong

Malcolm Gladwell:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

In some creative forms, like lyric poetry, the importance of precocity has hardened into an iron law.

But the freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Paul Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

Gladwell's new book, Outliers, is available for pre-order. It will be released next month.

Late Bloomers

John Derbyshire:

Wolfgang Pauli had formulated the exclusion principle by the time he was 25. Werner Heisenberg was only 23 when he discovered matrix mechanics and just 25 when he developed the uncertainty principle. Paul Dirac’s reconciliation of quantum mechanics and special relativity came when he was 26. All three eventually received the Nobel Prize for work they had done before the age of 30. Their revolutionary discoveries in the 1920s inspired the term Knabenphysik—boys’ physics—and Segrè describes “the curse of the Knabenphysik, the notion that one should have done something of significance before turning thirty.” The causes of decline are mysterious:

Maybe you stop believing you can change the world, or maybe you realize more quickly that a crazy idea is just that and do not pursue it as vigorously. Maybe you can’t assimilate new material as rapidly as you did when you were younger. Perhaps, having set a new course for physics once, you experience a psychological and intellectual resistance to shifting direction again.

For older physicists—like Einstein, whom the younger generation revered but ignored—it wasn’t easy to keep up. And even for the revolutionaries, the transition from being prodigies to professors was difficult; neither Pauli, Heisenberg, nor Dirac achieved anything nearly as important after turning thirty as they had before.

The Brat Pack of Quantum Mechanics

John Steele Gordon:

Why is our system is prone to panics?

Thomas Jefferson.

A Short Banking History of the United States

Ministers are pushing ahead with contentious plans to give police and security services increased access to communications data because of fears they are failing to keep pace with the use of the internet by terrorists and criminals.

Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, said yesterday a public consultation was planned for next year on the nature of such powers and a new legislative framework that would "seek [1] to protect civil liberties".

Ms Smith insisted that there were no plans for an "enormous database" [2] containing details of every e-mail, internet search, or phone or online conversation. She also ruled out giving local authorities powers to trawl [3] through such data.

Translations:

1. We'll give it the old college try, but we're not making any promises.
2. Our experts say an enormous number of smaller databases is more scalable.
3. Disks are cheap, so we're just going to FedEx them the whole thing.

British government seeks more access to 'vital' data

Louis Menand:

Is texting bringing us closer to the end of life as we currently tolerate it?

Back when most computing was done on a desktop, people used to complain about how much pressure they felt to respond quickly to e-mail. At least, in those days, it was understood that you might have walked away from your desk. There is no socially accepted excuse for being without your cell phone.

Thumbspeak

Andrew Sullivan:

For centuries, writers have experimented with forms that evoke the imperfection of thought, the inconstancy of human affairs, and the chastening passage of time. But as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.

Why I Blog

Fareed Zakaria:

Some of us—especially those under 60—have always wondered what it would be like to live through the kind of epochal event one reads about in books.

Well, this is it.

Amid all the difficulties and hardship that we are about to undergo, I see one silver lining. This crisis has—dramatically, vengefully—forced the United States to confront the bad habits it has developed over the past few decades. If we can kick those habits, today's pain will translate into gains in the long run.

There Is a Silver Lining

Nate Silver is a number-crunching prodigy who went from correctly forecasting baseball games to correctly forecasting presidential primaries—and perhaps the election itself. Here’s how he built a better crystal ball.

Nate Silver: More understanding. Less kicking and throwing things.

The Spreadsheet Psychic

Jeffrey Sachs:

The era of small government is dead.

Either we once again invest in our future, notably through an expanded public sector, or we will lose our future.

The immediate need is to save the financial system through ample liquidity from the Federal Reserve, government backing of the commercial-paper market, and banking sector recapitalization, mainly by private money but also from public funds as needed.

Yet the greater challenge is not simply to stop a collapse, and certainly not to resurrect the housing bubble, an impossible and misguided goal that is still widely espoused through one scheme or another to get mortgages flowing again.

How to Rebuild America