Maven lasky biography of donald

“Old Tree,” a foot-tall sculpture of a tree and hyperrealistic but for its screaming-pink hue, materialized in early May on the Spur, a segment of New York City’s High Line that sits above 10th Avenue. Created by Swiss artist Pamela Rosenkranz, it’s billed as a reflection of, as High Line Art curator Cecilia Alemani put it, the “High Line’s complexities as both a natural landscape and a built structure.” Maybe that doesn’t sound so profound, but the artwork, which I first glimpsed in an almost hallucinatory flash of color as I drove uptown, resonated so strongly with me that it felt as if it had somehow burst from my own consciousness.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trees, specifically about where and how we plant them. I have this sense that, as we incorporate trees into the built environment—something we’re doing more routinely as our need to remove carbon from the atmosphere becomes undeniable—we’re forgetting the simple fact that they’re alive, and that they have needs that may not neatly dovetail with decisions made by teams of architects and designers.

After all, trees have an agenda, too. At least that’s the message of recent books such as forester Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees () and scientist Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (). These books advance the alluring idea that trees are sentient beings, capable of communicating with one another via underground networks of roots and fungi. (I don’t think it could be an accident that Rosenkranz’s tree can also be read as a jumbo cluster of neurons.) And trees, unlike humans, are long-term thinkers, with little use for concepts like efficiency and expediency.

This makes trees’ increasingly ubiquitous coupling with buildings—where they’re often planted in ways that appear restrictive and overtly unnatural—particularly puzzling. If you’re the kind of person who looks at architectural renderings, you’ve surely seen a number of them in the past couple of years that show acutel

Or at least human. Richard Thaler has led a revolution in the study of economics by understanding the strange ways people behave with their money. By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

t is possible that Richard Thaler changed his mind about economic theory and went on to challenge what had become a hopelessly dry and out-of-touch discipline because, one day, when a few of his supposedly rational colleagues were over at his house, he noticed that they were unable to stop themselves from gorging on some cashew nuts he'd put out. Then again, it could have been because a friend admitted to Thaler that, although he mowed his own lawn to save $10, he would never agree to cut the lawn next door in return for the same $10 or even more. But the moment that sticks in Thaler's mind occurred back in the 's, when he and another friend, a computer maven named Jeff Lasky, decided to skip a basketball game in Rochester because of a swirling snowstorm.

"But if we had bought the tickets already, we'd go," Lasky noted.

"True -- and interesting," Thaler replied.

Thaler began to make note of these episodes -- anomalies, he called them -- and to chalk them up on his blackboard at the University of Rochester, where he was a young, unheralded and untenured assistant professor. Each o

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