The data show Americans move geographically less. So what is the cause? “My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.”

“We turned to ritual, to dance, to quiet conversations that played softly like a piano in the dark, to the old ways, to prayer, to cussing, to tears, to side eye, to righteous pettiness, to shade throwing, to memes, to each other. Increasingly, we turned to song. This was hardly by chance.”

Add the historic city of Nimrud (Nimrod in the U.S.) to the list of places ISIS has utterly destroyed. But hey, technology: “Digital scanning, robot etching and 3D reproduction can recreate these monuments, to an exactness unknown to past attempts at such reinstatement. Extrusion techniques can rebuild monuments using the dust of the ruins themselves.”

Jessica Gross talks to Dan Ariely, Mr. Behavioral Economics, who explains just what behavioral economics is (it’s the way to leave behind “Assume x“) and why bonuses just aren’t such a good idea.

Why might people in the past have been hesitant to embrace the idea of progress? The main argument against it was that it implies a disrespect of previous generations. As the historian Carl Becker noted in a classic work written in the early 1930s, “a Philosopher could not grasp the modern idea of progress … until he was willing to abandon ancestor worship, until he analyzed away his inferiority complex toward the past, and realized that his own generation was superior to any yet known.”