The mousetrap motif plays a major role in tales and literature, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who set one to find his father’s murderer, to Agatha Cristie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, that opened in London’s West End in 1952 and is still running today 30,000 performances...

In a speech delivered in the autumn of 2002, as the United States moved inexorably toward war with Iraq, the late Joan Didion delivered an offhand remark that effectively summed up the flaw at the heart of the logic behind that coming war, and of the logic of a number...