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

You can only value an asset, even gold, in relation to other assets.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

The potential traps your financial advisor is selling are too numerous to mention.  An excerpt from Josh Brown’s Backstage Wall Street.  (Registered Rep)

An in-depth look inside a school for quants.  (FT)

Growth

Some really frighteningly ambitious startup ideas.  (Paul Graham)

What government can do in a low-growth world to make people net-net happier.  (The Psy-Fi Blog)

How do we face a human capital paradox?  (HBR)

Psychology

On the science of innovation. An excerpt from Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works.  (WSJ)

Everything you ever wanted to know about visualization.  (SMB Training)

On the relationship between habit and willpower.  (Economic Principals)

Profiles

How Sara Blankley, creator of Spanx, squeezed onto the Forbes Billionaire list.  (Forbes)

Jeff Bezos’s success has come in large part by taking the long view.  (Economist)

Stephen Wolfram is living the fully digitized life.  (Wired)

How Lenny Dykstra got nailed.  (SI via @longreads)

Science

A statistician is changing the way we total up the costs of war.  (Foreign Policy)

We’re underestimating the risk of human extinction.  (The Atlantic)

The mystery of 18 twitching teenagers in Le Roy, New York.  (NYTimes)

How doctors reinvented the artificial heart.  (Popular Science)

Pastimes

Video games change your brain.  (WSJ)

Boy Scouts vs. Girl Scouts: a world apart.  (The Atlantic)

Charles P. Pierce, “Gradually, football has seen its appeal slip at the most basic levels.”  (Grantland)

Book excerpts

Excerpts from Robert Shiller’s forthcoming Finance and the Good Society.  (Bloomberg, part 2, part 3, part 4)

An excerpt from Bryce G. Hoffman’s American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company.  (WSJ)

A review of David Abulfia’s The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean.  (The American Interest via Big Picture)

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