You know that one person in your life who is just an absolute saint? She always puts everyone else's needs before her own. She is genuinely concerned about the welfare of the people around her, even the ones she doesn't know. She is there to listen to every single complaint you have, no matter how trivial and no matter how many times you have complained to her before. In every situation she is the first one to notice when someone feels uncomfortable, and she is the first person to try to put things right. She makes you feel like a terrible person, by comparison. Well, good news! She's not [...]

Do you know why investment banks and hedge funds and insurance companies actually work? If you just said "LAWYERS" or "THE FED WINDOW," you are technically correct. But on a more fundamental level, it's because there are thousands of Ivy League children assiduously doing math all day. These firms are the nation's number one consumer of nerds, and that is why, in the end, great amounts of money are made. (Though it's never the nerds that get the big bonuses, which is a shame.) So when businesses try to rip off a model—for instance, the fine people who mixed viatical settlements with derivative instruments, that is to say, [...]

The problem with explaining the Hate Retweet is I can't really point you to any examples, because it 1. ruins the (kinda mean) fun and 2. it'd be rude to display an example to people who don't get or haven't noticed they've been hate-retweeted. But there is, for instance, a journalist in New York who's become a vigilant, expert hate-retweeter. It's pretty great, if sometimes breathtakingly cruel—it's done completely without commentary, of course, just straight retweeting. The commentary is all in the broadcast—just the holding up of something someone said. And I imagine that most of the people retweeted by him have no idea what's going on—that he's really [...]