links for 2008-09-08

"On our wedding night, we invited friends over to play Scrabble. I just couldn't see why anyone would go to so much trouble just to have sex."

She always wants to know what she's talking about: 'This is what the morning looks like in this village. This is what nighttime looks like. This is what it's like to be a woman. This is what it's like to feed a family. This is what it's like not to. This is what it sounds like if you can't.'

"Fifty percent of citizens are smoking in this country," Medvedev said. "That's the highest rate in the world. I would not even mention alcohol." – The average life expectancy of male Russians hovers around 60

"Everyone has a ratio of satisfaction and frustration. What makes the Internet different is that it's so easy to express this frustration. Sometimes, people are too cowardly to assert themselves in person. They don't want to be shouted down, or they may know that what they're saying is absurd. But for those kinds of people, the anonymous empowerment of the Internet is like a drug. They're not just expressing anger, but authority."

"It is deeply appealing at a psychological level because the idea of meaninglessness is deeply threatening. Human societies have always tried to create some kind of framework of meaning to give history and our own personal lives some kind of significance."

"If a valuable asset (a grazing field, say) is held in common, each individual will try to exploit as much of it as possible. Villagers will send all their cows out to graze at the same time, and soon the field will be useless. When there’s no ownership, the pursuit of individual self-interest can make everyone worse off."