Mark D. White

This month (and last) I've been quite busy with school matters, but there's also been plenty of time for other pursuits, such as…

• Work continues on The Illusion of Well-Being; I've struggled with the structure and presentation of the argument, but I made a breakthrough recently, and things seem to back on track. (Lesson learned: Every book is different and must be treated as such.)
• A good chunk of this month was spent reviewing the copyedits for The Virtues of Captain America — the copyediting was very light but I did an enormous amount of rewriting (plus adding a few references to comics that had come out since I submitted the manuscript, including the conclusion to Rich Remender first arc on Captain America and Warren Ellis and Mike McKone's graphic novel Avengers: Endless Wartime).
• I submitted abstracts to the spring 2014 meetings of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities and the Law and Society Association, based on my delayed law-and-economics book project.
• I accepted a generous invitation to speak to the PPE program at Duke University in early November, where my book The Manipulation of Choice was assigned in a capstone seminar class.

And a few online items that may merit a note:

• Upon kind invitation, I contributed "The richness of personal interests: A neglected aspect of the nudge debate" to the LSE British Politics and Policy blog (October 23).
• I posted a new piece at Psychology Today, "Does Everyone Find Confidence Attractive?" (October 15).
• I contributed two substantial posts to Economics and Ethics. First, I offered "An Answer to 'Questions for Free-Market Moralists'" (October 20), in response to Amia Srinivasan's piece "Questions for Free-Market Moralists" in The New York Times' philosophy column The Stone. Second, I argued "'Is Economics a Science?' I Couldn't Care Less" (October 21) in response to Raj Chetty's affirmative piece "Yes, Economics Is a Science," also in The New York Times. (The Times kept me very busy those two days.)
• A welcome surprise: a mention of an "old" book, The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination(which I edited with Chrisoula Andreou) at Scientific American (in connection with an article on procrastination which, sadly, does not mention the book, but does focus on my good friend Tim Pychyl, a true expert in the field).
• Last but not least, GQ France has recognized me, though regrettably not as a fashion icon.