http://www.newyorker.com/reporti ... fa_fact_macfarquhar

这段话不错：
I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.

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When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”“It was Buffalo Springfield.”..............

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