December 31, 2013.

Jurist Prudence? Candid Judges Speak Out

"You can turn round now," said Julia.

Judges typically confine their opinions to their rulings. But 2013 was a year of exceptions.

He turned round, and for a second almost failed to recognize her. What he had actually expected was to see her naked. But she was not naked. The transformation that had happened was much more surprising than that. She had painted her face.

In Nebraska, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf in February launched Hercules and the umpire, a blog that offers a mix of insights on the judicial process, legal news, personal reflections and wisdom. One nugget of advice to young judges: "It's not your job to save the world. Do law, leave justice to Clint Eastwood."

She must have slipped into some shop in the proletarian quarters and bought herself a complete set of make-up materials. Her lips were deeply reddened, her cheeks rouged, her nose powdered; there was even a touch of something under the eyes to make them brighter. It was not very skilfully done, but Winston's standards in such matters were not high. He had never before seen or imagined a woman of the Party with cosmetics on her face. The improvement in her appearance was startling. With just a few dabs of colour in the right places she had become not only very much prettier, but, above all, far more feminine. Her short hair and boyish overalls merely added to the effect. As he took her in his arms a wave of synthetic violets flooded his nostrils. He remembered the half darkness of a basement kitchen, and a woman's cavernous mouth. It was the very same scent that she had used; but at the moment it did not seem to matter.

In his latest book, "Reflections on Judging," Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago pleads "guilty" to upholding a voter-identification law "now widely regarded as a means of voter suppression." The passage, picked up by several media outlets, was widely viewed as a mea culpa----a rare instance of a judge saying he got it wrong.

December 30, 2013.

More Rational Resolutions

Winston gazed abstractedly through the muslin curtain. Down in the yard the red-armed woman was still marching to and fro between the washtub and the line. She took two more pegs out of her mouth and sang with deep feeling:

Can "goal factoring" help you keep your New Year's resolution to hit the gym every day in 2014?

They sye that time 'eals all things,

They sye you can always forget;

But the smiles an' the tears acrorss the years 

They twist my 'eart-strings yet! 

"Goal factoring," a method of designing better plans, is one of the techniques taught by the Center for Applied Rationality, which hosts three-day workshops that teach attendees how to use science-based approaches to achieve goals. A November workshop in Ossining, N.Y., instructed 23 participants on how thinking about one's future self as a different person can help goal-setting and why building up an "emotional library" of associations can reduce procrastination.

She knew the whole drivelling song by heart, it seemed. Her voice floated upward with the sweet summer air, very tuneful, charged with a sort of happy melancholy. One had the feeling that she would have been perfectly content, if the June evening had been endless and the supply of clothes inexhaustible, to remain there for a thousand years, pegging out diapers and singing rubbish. It struck him as a curious fact that he had never heard a member of the Party singing alone and spontaneously. It would even have seemed slightly unorthodox, a dangerous eccentricity, like talking to oneself. Perhaps it was only when people were somewhere near the starvation level that they had anything to sing about. 

CFAR, a Berkeley, Calif.-based nonprofit, is prominent in the growing "rationality movement," which explores the science of optimized decision-making. In recent years, books about decision-making and probability theory----including "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, who writes a regular column for The Wall Street Journal, and "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman----have been best-sellers. Websites like Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong serve as communities for those who believe the best way to be effective, whether in changing eating habits or changing the world, is to actively look at the lessons of science and hard data. The movement draws on some of the same research as economists who argue that investors behave irrationally.

December 29, 2013.

Loan Sharks Smell Blood in China Waters

Winston had squatted down beside her. He tore open a corner of the packet.

 Sitting in an empty Papa John's PZZA -1.07%  pizza restaurant, real-estate developer Yang Boqun said he would somehow catch up on loan payments for 150 million yuan ($24.7 million) he borrowed to finish a five-story shopping mall in the eastern Chinese city of Jinhua.

"It's real tea. Not blackberry leaves."


But the mall's only tenants are a Bentley car dealership, movie theater and the restaurant----and the loan's interest rate is a steep 40%. The reason: When construction costs on the two billion-yuan project soared surprisingly high, traditional banks couldn't lend more to Mr. Yang.

"There's been a lot of tea about lately. They've captured India, or something," she said vaguely. "But listen, dear. I want you to turn your back on me for three minutes. Go and sit on the other side of the bed. Don't go too near the window. And don't turn round till I tell you."

So he turned to Credit China Holdings Ltd. 8207.HK +1.54%  , one of the thousands of so-called shadow lenders in China. Mr. Yang got the money----and now Credit China wants it back.

December 28, 2013.

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues

(this story had an illustration of Camille Paglia)

"It's Inner Party coffee. There's a whole kilo here," she said.

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

"How did you manage to get hold of all these things?"

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

"It's all Inner Party stuff. There's nothing those swine don't have, nothing. But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and----look, I got a little packet of tea as well."

The fact that the acclaimed book----the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art----was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

December 27, 2013.

(The headline photo was an illustration of a man talking to a crowd.)

The Best Financial Advice I Ever Got (or Gave)

"Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here's a loaf of bread proper white bread, not our bloody stuff----and a little pot of jam. And here's a tin of milk----but look! This is the one I'm really proud of. I had to wrap a bit of sacking round it, because----"

The holidays are a time for relaxing, helping the less fortunate, showering family and friends with love and attention—and, sometimes, for smiling and nodding through unsolicited stock tips from an overbearing relative who has been sampling the eggnog.

But she did not need to tell him why she had wrapped it up. The smell was already filling the room, a rich hot smell which seemed like an emanation from his early childhood, but which one did occasionally meet with even now, blowing down a passage-way before a door slammed, or diffusing itself mysteriously in a crowded street, sniffed for an instant and then lost again.

But good advice can make careers and forever change lives for the better. So The Wall Street Journal asked an array of prominent people who manage, invest, study and write about money to share the single best piece of financial advice they ever received----or gave.

"It's coffee," he murmured, "real coffee."

The respondents included investors who collectively have earned billions of dollars for clients and themselves; founders and owners of businesses that are household names; and Nobel laureates who shaped the world's understanding of the forces that drive the stock market.

December 26, 2013.

Childhood Cancer's New Conundrum

"Half a second," she said. "Just let me show you what I've brought. Did you bring some of that filthy Victory Coffee? I thought you would. You can chuck it away again, because we shan't be needing it. Look here."

Adults who survived childhood cancer are facing a new health challenge: premature aging.

As more survivors reach their 30s and 40s, researchers are noticing health problems more common to much older people, such as frailty and serious memory impairment.

She fell on her knees, threw open the bag, and tumbled out some spanners and a screwdriver that filled the top part of it. Underneath were a number of neat paper packets. The first packet that she passed to Winston had a strange and yet vaguely familiar feeling. It was filled with some kind of heavy, sand-like stuff which yielded wherever you touched it.

"It isn't sugar?" he said.

"Their overall physical being resembles that of people 30 years older than they are,'' said Kirsten Ness, associate member of the Department of Epidemiology and Cancer Control at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis. She is one of the authors of a number of studies looking at premature aging in childhood cancer survivors.

December 25, 2013.

The Last Christmas Present: Lots of Trash

"Oh, the usual reason. It's started early this time."

Christmas isn't so pretty on the back end.

For a moment he was violently angry. During the month that he had known her the nature of his desire for her had changed. At the beginning there had been little true sensuality in it. Their first love-making had been simply an act of the will. But after the second time it was different. The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt that he had a right to. When she said that she could not come, he had the feeling that she was cheating him. But just at this moment the crowd pressed them together and their hands accidentally met. She gave the tips of his fingers a quick squeeze that seemed to invite not desire but affection. It struck him that when one lived with a woman this particular disappointment must be a normal, recurring event; and a deep tenderness, such as he had not felt for her before, suddenly took hold of him. He wished that they were a married couple of ten years' standing. He wished that he were walking through the streets with her just as they were doing now but openly and without fear, talking of trivialities and buying odds and ends for the household. He wished above all that they had some place where they could be alone together without feeling the obligation to make love every time they met. It was not actually at that moment, but at some time on the following day, that the idea of renting Mr. Charrington's room had occurred to him. When he suggested it to Julia she had agreed with unexpected readiness. Both of them knew that it was lunacy. It was as though they were intentionally stepping nearer to their graves. As he sat waiting on the edge of the bed he thought again of the cellars of the Ministry of Love. It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

The annual frenzy of gift giving brings smiles to kids and billions of dollars to retailers that rely on the year-end holidays to drive a fifth or more of their annual sales. But the holidays also produce an ever growing pile of trash, one that is getting bigger as Americans shift more of their shopping to the Web.

At this moment there was a quick step on the stairs. Julia burst into the room. She was carrying a tool-bag of coarse brown canvas, such as he had sometimes seen her carrying to and fro at the Ministry. He started forward to take her in his arms, but she disengaged herself rather hurriedly, partly because she was still holding the tool bag.

David Menke, a sanitation worker in Ohio, sees it firsthand driving a garbage truck and collecting trash on the outskirts of Cincinnati. "You can tell people are buying more things online, as there are already a lot of Amazon and FedEx boxes," said the 34 year old.