The title is a small trick, and it works on you before you've read a page. Usefulness and useless aren't supposed to share a sentence — that's the oxymoron, and it's clever precisely because Ordine means it literally. He's not being ironic. He's arguing that the things a market can't price are exactly the things that make us better, and that a civilization organized around exclusive economic interest is a civilization quietly destroying itself. His clearest proof is the simpl

Last week I counted the tabs open on my laptop and got to twenty-three. Each one was a yes I had said to myself at some point — an article I meant to read, a tool I meant to try, a person I meant to get back to. Not one of them was bad, and that was the whole trouble. None of them was bad enough to close, so all twenty-three stayed open, glowing, each one quietly asking for a piece of me. Greg McKeown has six words for the way out of that, and I have never been able to shake

You already know the kidney heist story, even if you've never heard it called that. A traveler meets someone attractive at a bar, wakes up in a bathtub full of ice with a phone taped to the wall and a note telling him to call 911 immediately, and discovers a surgical scar where one of his kidneys used to be. It is not true. It has never been true. Chip and Dan Heath open Made to Stick with it anyway, because the story has spread across the world for decades on nothing but wor