The weekend is a great time to catch up on some of the reading you skipped during the week.  We hope you enjoy this set of long-form links.

Finance

Roger Lowenstein on what the crackdown on insider trading means for investors, hedge funds and the market.  (NYTimes)

Sunspots, animal spirits and extrinsic volatility.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

Scientists turning into quants is not a new phemenon.  (Magic Maths Money via @moneyscience)

Roger Ebert on the future of Netflix ($NFLX).  (Businessweek)

Economics

What does the government use econometric models of the economy that nobody believes work?  (American)

Why monetary policy is ineffective in a post-credit economy.  (Macroeconomic Resilience)

The increasing payoff to beauty.  (The Telegraph)

Why we need more population density, not less.  (Daily Ticker)

Psychology

Why we spend more when we are relaxed.  (The Frontal Cortex)

No one is immune from the dangers of confirmation bias.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

On the virtues of unconscious thought in making difficult decisions.  (The Frontal Cortex)

Hayes Davenport, “How is it possible, then, that paid experts pick at about the same level of accuracy as any armchair prognosticator?”  (Freakonomics)

Society

We now live in the most peaceable time in human history.  (WSJ)

What does war mean when it is fought by robots?  (New York Review of Books)

Reuters, Bloomberg and the future of journalism.  (The Atlantic)

RIP, REM.  A collection on links on the breakup of the first indie megaband.  (The Browser)

Inside the world of “map obsessives.”  (Slate)

Baseball

How the Boston Red Sox have put into action the lessons of Moneyball.  (SI)

The aftermath of Moneyball has been better for Michael Lewis than Billy Beane.  (NYTimes)

The story of a real life Crash Davis.  (Grantland)

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