Discussions of corporate governance still pay much attention to the structure, role, and responsibilities of the board of directors. Most boards contain a mixture of insiders and outsiders. Insiders are people who are employed or have been employed by the corporation or its subsidiaries. The CEO of a corporation, for example, is often a member of its board of directors. Outsiders are more independent of the corporation. The insiders provide specific insight into the relevant corporation. They have specialized information and experience of the corporation precisely because of their close links to it. The outsiders provide a more objective perspective and a more neutral oversight. They can prevent group-think and collusion among the insiders, thereby protecting the interests of the shareholders. Indeed, most accounts of corporate governance emphasize the importance of the board having a majority of outsiders. Studies suggest that having a majority of outsiders on the board generally improves the performance of a corporation.

Although all human populations represent a single evolutionary lineage, there are some genetic differences between human populations. These differences are minor compared to the interpopulation differences observed in most other species. We are not subdivided into discrete groups and clusters, as most of our diversity displays gradual changes, including such traditional racial traits such as skin color. The few genetic changes that show a more discrete distribution have distributions that reflect local selective agents and not races. For example, sickle cell is found in high frequency in malarial regions and is not a disease of blacks, as it is in high frequency in many non-African populations that live in malarial regions. The vast majority of genetic diversity in humans exists between us as individuals, not members of a population, making each of us genetically unique.

Very huge expansions in irrigated cropland were achieved in parts of Central Asia during the 20th century during the period of the Soviet Union. The Karakum Canal, which diverts water from the Amudarya westwards across southern Turkmenistan, was completed in 1986 after more than 30 years in construction. The canal is no less than 1,400 kilometres long and the water it delivers has enabled crops to be grown on more than 7,000 square kilometres of land that would otherwise be too dry for cultivation. Sadly, however, Turkmenistan's irrigation systems are poorly designed and inefficient, resulting in large tracts of cropland facing problems of salinization and/or waterlogging. The loss of water from irrigation canals is also considerable. Most are not lined, so water seeps away, and evaporation rates in the arid climate are high. Consequently, more than one-third of the water diverted from the Amudarya never reaches the fields.

No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting - impatiently - for a response. At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, an array of voice mail messages, and the list of next steps from your last meeting, it's tempting to clear the decks before starting your own work. When you're up-to-date, you tell yourself, it will be easier to focus. The trouble with this approach is it means spending the best part of the day on other people's priorities. By the time you settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy dips and your brain slows. Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be better, you tell yourself. But tomorrow brings another pile of e-mails, phone messages, and to-do list items. If you carry on like this, you will spend most of your time responding to incoming demands and answering questions framed by other people. And you will never create anything truly worthwhile.

Every comic moment is traumatic. The enjoyment that comedy offers is inseparable from the trauma associated with making conscious an unconscious connection. Comedy forces us to confront, for instance, the failings of those whom we suppose to embody flawless authority. This authority secures the ground of our existence. Though we can laugh at this ground trembling, it nonetheless also delivers a traumatic shock. Or comedy makes explicit the connection between the act of eating and the act of defecating, a connection that might make it harder to enjoy a hamburger. Those who hate all forms of comedy and retreat from every joker they see coming are in some sense right. They recognize the inseparability of the enjoyment that comedy provides from its traumatic impact. There is no comedy without a jolt that potentially shatters the ground of our everyday lives.

The response you make to someone's message does not have to be immediate. You can respond minutes, days, or even years later. For example, your second-grade teacher may have asked you to stop throwing rocks at a group of birds that were on the playground. Perhaps the teacher added that the birds were part of a family and were gathering food for their babies. She might also have indicated that birds feel pain just like people. Perhaps twenty years later, as you think about eating an animal, you remember those words from your teacher and decide to become a vegetarian. It is important to remember the power of your messages and to consider the ethical consequences of your communication actions, for, whether or not you want to grant those consequences, you are changing people each time you exchange messages with them.

Hierarchy is probably the most common form of organizing the workplace. There aren't a lot of good alternatives to it, and companies need some say in managing workers, particularly as they scale. However, there are also a lot of downsides to hierarchy, and over the last decade my collaborators and I have documented the many ways in which it can go wrong. Team members squabble over resources, engage in power struggles, and battle over rank. All of this harms performance. One of the burning questions in management research right now is, what are the best alternatives to hierarchy? But it's a complex picture - hierarchy isn't always bad or harmful, and its effectiveness may depend on where and how it's implemented, and how the person at the top manages the hierarchy. For example, there is growing interest in remote work and virtual teams, and in that context, hierarchy works quite well.

When we look around at our dwellings at the end of our lives and survey all the commodities that we have accumulated, we often come to the insight that they amount to nothing but a heap of worthless junk. Like most insights that come as one approaches the end, this one is entirely misleading. The fact that the commodities were worthless junk from the beginning is what gave them their sublimity and what gave us enjoyment in accumulating them. No one values accumulating useful things. The collector, who is a derivation of the capitalist bent on total accumulation, always collects items with no use value - old stamps, empty beer cans, baseball trading cards, and so on. One doesn't collect useful items because there is no enjoyment attached to their accumulation. Though capitalism preaches self-interest, the enjoyment that it offers - the enjoyment of the sublime commodity - is an enjoyment that depends on the absence of self-interest.

The problem is not that using social media directly makes us unhappy. Indeed, as the positive studies found, certain social media activities, when isolated in an experiment, modestly boost well-being. The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that's massively more valuable. As the negative studies imply, the more you use social media, the less time you tend to devote to offline interaction, and therefore the worse this value deficit becomes - leaving the heaviest social media users much more likely to be lonely and miserable. The small boosts you receive from posting on a friend's wall or liking their latest Instagram photo can't come close to compensating for the large loss experienced by no longer spending real-world time with that same friend. As Shakya summarizes: Where we want to be cautious ... is when the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with 'likes' on a post.

It turns out that we tend to have more doubt about the truth of the facts described by speakers with a foreign accent compared to native speakers. For example, if we are asked to judge whether we believe the content is real in the phrase Ants do not sleep, we believe it to be more true when someone with a native accent says it rather than someone with a foreign accent. In addition, it seems that when we interact with a person who has a foreign accent, we tend to process language somewhat differently than with native people. In some ways, and maybe due to certain problems with understanding, we pay less attention to the details of speech and look more at the communicative intent. It's a bit like we do not care what the person says, but what they really mean. And that is why our memory of the exact words that people use in a conversation is much more accurate when people speak with a native accent. So when you speak in a foreign language, don't expect people to remember exactly what you said or the details of your message.

Driven by enlightenment ideals, exploration gradually evolved from the wholesale plunder of foreign lands in search of gold to more virtuous scientific purposes. Instead of conquerors, explorers were now botanists, physicists, astronomers, and anthropologists. It was no longer enough to merely find the world - exploration now meant truly discovering it. Curiosity had always been an exploratory motive, but an international competition for prestige based on scientific discovery was something new. Even the ships were intended to reflect the new ideals under which they sailed, with names such as Discovery, Resolution, Endeavour, Adventure, Geographie, Naturaliste, and Astrolabe. Some ventures, such as the French 1735 mission to Ecuador to measure the shape of Earth, were virtually devoid of nonscientific purpose. Nevertheless, even purely scientific voyages were intended to enhance the image of the sponsoring nation in an eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century equivalent of the Cold War space race. In this exploratory contest, a new figure emerged: the scientist-hero, conquering ignorance on behalf of the nation.

John Barth discusses an Egyptian papyrus complaining that all the stories have been told and that therefore nothing remains for the contemporary writer but to retell them. That papyrus describing the postmodern condition is forty-five hundred years old. This is not a terrible thing, though. Writers notice all the time that their characters resemble somebody - Persephone, Pip, Long John Silver, La Belle Dame sans Merci - and they go with it. What happens, if the writer is good, is usually not that the work seems derivative or trivial but just the opposite: the work actually acquires depth and resonance from the echoes and chimes it sets up with prior texts, weight from the accumulated use of certain basic patterns and tendencies. Moreover, works are actually more comforting because we recognize elements in them from our prior reading. I suspect that a wholly original work, one that owed nothing to previous writing, would so lack familiarity as to be quite discouraging to readers.