The Economic and Cultural Divide in America

For most of the last century, wages in poorer parts of America rose faster than wages in richer places, as inventions were put to work in the hinterlands. After Henry Ford invented the Model T, for example, workers on assembly lines all over the Midwest built it. Now it’s just the opposite. Bright young people from all over America, typically with college degrees, are streaming into the talent hubs of America—where the sum of their capacities is far greater than they’d be separately. ...

 Reading a Novel Causes a Temporary Boost in Brain Power

We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state dat...