8 Fascinating Reads

New research published in the British Medical Journal showed the impact of the crisis led to nearly 5,000 additional suicides in 2009 compared to the norm. Nearly the entire increase can be attributed to men taking their own lives, according to the survey of data from 54 countries.

In the U.S. and Canada, male suicides jumped by nearly 9% in 2009, while newer members of the European Union, including Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, saw their male suicide rates spike by an average of 13.3%.

There is research showing that the more you pool your money, the happier you are with your marriage. These effects seem to peter out at some very high level -- if you keep 5 percent of your income to yourself in order to have a little bit of discretionary spending, it won't make you any less happy than you'd be if you pool 100 percent. But people who pool 80 percent are happier than those who pool 70 percent, and so on. People who keep it all to themselves are the least happy.

Wal-Mart Stores is so committed to becoming America's biggest beer retailer that it has been selling Budweiser, Coors and other brews almost at cost in at least some stores.

The markup on a 36-pack of Coors Light cans at a Los-Angeles-area store was 0.6 percent, compared with 16.2 percent for a package of Flaming Hot Cheetos, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. Companies typically don't release information about markups so the March data provide a rare glimpse of Wal-Mart's alcohol pricing strategy.

The people signing up for the courses are, by and large, the ones for whom a traditional college setting isn't ideal. They're usually older, poorer, busier, or some combination of the three. And yet they're spending more money on college. By some counts, 96 percent of for-profit students take out loans, and nearly all of them are drawing from federal financial aid. In comparison, only 13 percent of students going to community college take out loans, because community colleges are a fraction of the cost.

Q: Turning to Apple, where is it at right now as a company in this post-Steve Jobs period?

[Dediu]: Still too early to tell. They seem to be cooking a lot of things and the great experiment of whether a company can be Jobsian without Jobs is still going on. I have been trying to put together a picture of how it operates. It's hard because that's their biggest secret. It's also a picture that few people have ever seen, even those who worked there a long time. The glimpses so far are tantalizing but there is so much we don't know and thus can't assess how robust it is. One thing that is clear to me is that there is no absorption by mainstream observers of what makes Apple tick. It's hiding in plain sight because what it is isn't anything anyone can recognize. Case in point is the functional and integrated dimensions. It's the largest functional organization outside the US Army and more integrated than Henry Ford's production system. Just describing it sounds medieval and it's so far outside convention that it's not something reasonable people are willing to believe actually exists.

The obvious rarely happens, the unexpected constantly occurs.

Patterns repeat, because human nature hasn't changed for thousand of years

It is what people actually did in the stock market that counted -- not what they said they were going to do.

We then planned to meet at 5 p.m. that day, and I invited Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to join us. Later that evening, the meeting commenced, with Democratic and Republican leaders from both the House and Senate.

Secretary Paulson described a meltdown and financial crisis from the depths of hell.

When I asked Bernanke what he thought of the secretary's characterization, he said, "If we do not act immediately, we will not have an economy by Monday." This was Thursday night. Everyone in the room was flabbergasted.

Back in April, Twitter's fake user population was estimated at 20 million accounts out of a total of 500 million. But Twitter spokesperson Jim Prosser also said at the time that 40% of Twitter accounts appear to be inactive because many people set up their accounts simply to "listen" to other people, rather than tweet themselves.