Author: Edouard Chazal

Why Do Humans Have Thumbs?

Of all the motions the hand can perform, perhaps none is so distinctively human as a punch in the nose. Other animals bite, claw, butt or stomp one another, but only the species that includes Muhammad Ali folds its hands into a fist to perform the quintessential act of intra-species male-on-male aggression.

David Carrier, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah, believes our key advantage is the dexterity and configuration of our thumb, which folds over the second and third fingers as a buttress, concentrating the striking power and protecting the delicate hand bones. (Crucially, male index fingers are short relative to the ring fingers, so they fit snugly behind the bulge of muscle at the thumb’s base; in women, the second and fourth fingers are typically the same length.)

→ Smithsonian Magazine

The Most Important Apple Executive You’ve Never Heard Of

At the center of all this is Srouji, 51, an Israeli who joined Apple after jobs at Intel and IBM. He’s compact, he’s intense, and he speaks Arabic, Hebrew, and French. His English is lightly accented and, when the subject has anything to do with Apple, nonspecific bordering on koanlike. “Hard is good. Easy is a waste of time,” he says when asked about increasingly thin iPhone designs. “The chip architects at Apple are artists, the engineers are wizards,” he answers another question. He’ll elaborate a bit when the topic is general. “When designers say, ‘This is hard,’ ” he says, “my rule of thumb is if it’s not gated by physics, that means it’s hard but doable.”

→ Bloomberg Businessweek

You Might Go Bankrupt If Your Next-Door Neighbor Wins the Lottery

Why would someone winning the jackpot cause someone living down the street to go bankrupt a year or two later? The economists argued that people who feel they are poorer than their peers may spend more in a conspicuous fashion, financing their purchases with debt. But that debt will need to be repaid, potentially leading to financial difficulties and even bankruptcy.

→ The Wall Street Journal

Why Not Just Print More Money?

The best alternative, Turner thinks, is his radical proposal—creating money and handing it out to entities that can spend it. He readily concedes that it wouldn’t matter much whether the newly minted money was forwarded to households in the form of bank credits, or used to finance tax cuts, or spent on building new roads and bridges. The key point is that the government would be stimulating the economy without issuing any new debt. It wouldn’t be accentuating the problem of debt overhang, or creating the conditions for yet another boom-and-bust cycle.

→ The New Yorker