Nathan P Myhrvold

These days, one of the saddest stories on Page 1 is about newspapers themselves. All over the country, venerable old dailies are shedding reporters, editors and other workers.

One reason “dismal science” aptly describes economics is that it so often winds up in a zero-sum trade-off of diminishing returns. That gets depressing when the global economy is in a sorry state, as it is now.

This month, the U.S. Department of Commerce launched a formal investigation into complaints, lodged by the U.S. solar-cell manufacturers, that the government of China is funneling loan guarantees, grants and subsidies to its solar-cell companies.

A remarkable thing happened in Silicon Valley during the past decade. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs set their sights on clean energy as the Next Big Thing. They audaciously hoped to reinvent energy by harnessing the incredible innovation that had transformed information technology and biotechnology.

A cult food is a dish people are passionate about that has at least some of the following five characteristics:

As we lurch from one high-stakes political drama to another, it is natural to wonder why societies aren’t better at avoiding self-inflicted crises. Here in the U.S. earlier this month, the government barely dodged default, even though economists reached consensus months ago on when the debt limit would need to be raised.

Patents rarely make headlines, but they did this month when Nortel Networks Corp., the defunct Canadian telecommunications giant, auctioned off its patent portfolio and drew an astonishing winning bid of $4.5 billion from a group of companies that includes both Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Complacency is baked into our species. We can’t resist thinking that recent experience defines the future. Give us a run of good luck, and we are apt to turn that into an implicit expectation that our luck will continue -- even that we are entitled to it.