Status Updates From Hive Mind: How Your Nation'...

Once one starts thinking about the value of connections, of relationships, it becomes obvious that cognitive skills are going to be a key ingredient in building good networks.

You swim a bit harder when the person in the next lane is swimming faster than you, whether you notice it consciously or not.

The only real way to check to see if one person can substantially influence your politics is to randomly change the people you talk to politics-or to randomly change what people talk to you about.

Voting is partly a trivia test (who's that person running for mayor again?), and people with higher IQ scores tend to do better on trivia tests.

Pande argues that informed voters can hold politicians accountable: they remember if the politician was corrupt, effective, scandalous, whatever.