A profile of the man who oversaw a miraculous turnaround in the Indian railway system:

Every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China.

The plan of action seems to have been this: First, hire a supremely competent deputy. Second, drink tea and watch TV.

Five myths about prison, with this refreshing conclusion:

We need to focus less on high-profile drug statutes and more on the ways small-fry drug convictions cause later crimes to result in longer sentences. Once we start admitting fewer people to prison, we should shift money from prisons to police. If this seems like tinkering, rather than a sweeping fix, that's because it is.

It's only February, but I'm already prepared to give out the Evil Line award for best sportswriting of 2009. A taste:

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says.

I found it hard to get a quote that did this article justice. Do yourself a favor and go read it, even if you don't like basketball or math. But especially if you're like me and enjoy both.

The economy's bad, but it's not that bad: a lesson in using graphs.

Some physicists at UT Austin claim to have invented a way to incinerate nuclear waste while producing power. I'm skeptical, just because of what they named it. The Super X Divertor? Really?