Leave it to Johnny Depp to re-ignite the controversy over what made the Mad Hatter mad. As reported by Pat Ryan in the New York Times (3/7/10), Johnny, who plays the Hatter in a new film (trailer), told a news conference that he thought the Hatter was mad because of mercury poisoning from hats, saying he's "this guy who literally is damaged goods." But while it's true that some hats contained mercury back in Lewis Carroll's day, the symptoms of mercury poisoning -- including "excessive shyness ... and a desire to remain unobserved and unobtrusive" hardly fit the Mad Hatter.

Another theory holds that the Hatter was inspired by a French phrase, "il raisonne comme une huitre," or "he reasons like an oyster." The idea is that "huitre" sounds like "hatter." Seems unlikely. Logicians, noting that Lewis Carroll "was well known as a mathematician, think the Mad Hatter is really the Mad Adder. They cite this Hatter quote: "If you knew Time as well as I do ... you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." In the Hatter's defense, physicist Robert A. Millikan wrote that the Hatter wasn't mad "when he gave to Time changeable, undependable, capricious qualities which we assign to personality."

The Hatter is concerned with time "since the Queen of Hearts has accused him of being a time-murderer." This adds heft to the theory that the Mad Hatter was based on "a top-hat wearing inventor, Theophilus Carter," who, in 1851, exhibited an "Alarm-Clock Bed" that tipped "the sleeper out of bed at the correct time." But the best "Mad as a Hatter" explanation comes from Lewis Carroll himself. Why a Mad Hatter, not a Mad Tailor or Shoemaker? (viaduct, why not a goose?) Carroll wrote, "I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense! Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them."

Walmart is the new Woodstock and Glenn Beck the new Abbie Hoffman, suggests David Brooks in the New York Times (3/5/10). Clearly, there's a big difference in politics between the '60s hippies and today's tea-partiers. As David writes: "One was on the left, the other is on the right. One was bohemian, the other is bourgeois. One was motivated by war, and the other motivated by runaway federal spending. One went to Woodstock, the other is more likely to go to Walmart." But David also thinks there are more similarities than differences.

"They go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches and extreme statements that are designed to shock polite society out of its stupor," he writes. On Amazon dot-com, observes David, the same people who are buying books such as "Liberal Fascism," are also buying "Rules for Radicals," a classic handbook of the New Left. And he thinks that "both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence ... the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Both groups "go in big for conspiracy theories ... and spend a lot of time worrying about being co-opted ... have a problem with authority" and have a largely "negative agenda: destroy the corrupt structures; defeat the establishment." However, says David, they have "no clear set of plans for what to do beyond the golden moment of personal liberation ... They don't seek to form a counter-establishment because they don't believe in establishments." Both groups, he concludes, "are radically anticonservative," because "conservatives believe in civilization -- in social structures, permanent institutions and just authorities."

The Yugo was "a turkey, a lemon, a dud, a failure, a blunder, a boondoggle and a bust," writes Jason Vuic in his new book, The Yugo, reviewed by Dick Teresi in the Wall Street Journal (3/4/10). Small wonder, given that it was manufactured in a factory that "had previously been used for making hand grenades," by workers who began drinking plum brandy "at eight in the morning and continued drinking during breaks, on the assembly line, and in spontaneous toasts." Some cars were so poorly made that they were already rusting before they left the factory.

That didn't stop Americans from embracing the Yugo when it first arrived in the States in August 1985, priced as it was at just $3,990, with some dealers offering it "for $99 down and $99 a month." In fact, the Yugo "became the fastest-selling first-year European import in U.S. history," selling 1,050 cars in a single day. Fortune magazine actually "named the Yugo one of its 'Outstanding Products for 1985 ' -- right up there with New Coke." But it wasn't long before this "cutting edge of Serbo-Croatian technology" began falling apart -- literally.

When Motor Trend road-tested the Yugo, it broke down. Consumer Reports wrote, "The clutch chattered. The brakes squealed ... The speedometer clicked. The hood became loose." The magazine said it couldn't recommend the car at any price. Contrary to popular belief, the Yugo was not named for its country of origin, Yugoslavia. Its manufacturer, Zastava, liked wind-related themes, and the car originally was to be called the Jugo, which is "a southeasterly wind on the Adriatic." Zastava changed the "J" to "Y," thinking it was easier to pronounce. And, as it happens, easier to ridicule, too, as in, "You go call the tow truck, and I'll stay here with the car."

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard's life changed when he and a friend took off to climb Monte Fitz Roy in South America in 1968, reports Michael J. Ybarra in the Wall Street Journal (2/19/10). "The experience led to an unlikely fate for a couple of dirtbags," writes Yvon, in his new, co-authored, "photo-crammed" book, 180º South. "We became philanthropists." Funny, everybody else thought they became retailers.

Yvon’s “dirtbag” friend was Doug Tompkins, who not only founded The North Face, but also co-founded Esprit, the casual apparel retailer, with his wife.  They were “dirtbags” because, when they left for the trip, Yvon had just gotten married and Doug and his wife had just had a daughter. The philanthropy part didn't happen until many years later, after Yvon and Doug had made their fortunes.

Doug went on to buy millions of acres in Chile and Argentina, which he plans to preserve as national parks; Yvon also "poured his wealth into buying land in Patagonia to preserve and restore." The book happened as a result of a second trip that re-created the original journey, some 40 years later. Yvon writes: "It is the nature of nature that you can't come to know it from a book, but you can get a glimpse here. Even that much will make you want to act -- and live for it."

"What we're willing to pay reveals much about the chaos inside our skulls," writes Peter Coy in a BusinessWeek review of "Priceless," by William Poundstone (2/1/10). We think we know the value of the things we buy, but in fact we have little idea, and no clue how much we're being exploited. As William explains in his book, "the numbers that make our world go around are not so solid, immutable and logically grounded as they appear. In the new psychology of price, values are slippery and contingent, as fluid as the reflections in a fun-house mirror."

This reality is famously played by luxury retailers who engage in a pricing trick known as "anchoring" -- that is, featuring an extremely high-priced item that makes other high-priced items look like bargains. Ralph Lauren, for example, offers an alligator bag for $16,995 that makes its $2,595 bag, made of mere calfskin, seem a steal. Williams Sonoma didn't sell many of its $279 breadmakers until it introduced a $429 model. Sales of the "cheaper" breadmaker doubled.

While all of this may sound obvious and old-hat -- because it is -- it raises the question of "why age-old pricing tricks work long after we should have wised up." The reason, according to William, is that the brain is wired to make quick decisions and therefore "constructs desires and beliefs on the fly," leaving us vulnerable to trickery. The solution, he advises, is simply to "stop and think of all the reasons that the proffered price might be unreasonable." Incidentally, the book's cover illustration features a fake price tag of $599.99 ... marked down to just $26.99.

Instead of the usual 33-city book tour, Stephen Elliott promoted his latest novel, "The Adderall Diaries," by holding discussions in strangers' living rooms. As he explains in a New York Times essay (1/17/10), Stephen decided that he "didn't want to travel thousands of miles to read to 10 people, sell four books, then spend the night in a cheap hotel room before flying home." Instead, when his new book was published, he let it be known via his website that he'd hold an event in anyone's home, provided they promised at least 20 guests.

Stephen would sleep on their couch, share airfare expenses with his publisher and hope to make up the difference by selling books. Most of the attendees had never been to a "literary event" before, and usually were a reflection of the host -- a nurse brought hospital workers; a musician brought rock 'n' rollers; and an artist brought other artists. Unlike previous book tours, he encountered few aspiring writers interested only in advice on how to get published. He found his audiences to be friendly and engaged -- after all, they were having a party.

Stephen sold his books one at a time, all told moving some 1,100 copies over 73 events. Not surprisingly, when reading to people with money, he found they would "buy books out of obligation, just to be polite, because you did a reading in their home, or for a signed souvenir of a fun evening." But he also said one of his best audiences was a group of 40 college students, who bought a total of just 10 books. For the most part, he concluded, his do-it-yourself, living-room tour didn't attract the "standard literary audience ... they were better."

"Technology criticism shouldn't be left to the Luddites," writes Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget, as reviewed by Glenn Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal (1/13/10). That's quite a statement, especially from Jaron, who "was one of the pioneers of immersive virtual worlds and helped popularize the term, 'virtual reality.'" But now Jaron is concerned that the likes of Google and Facebook -- "the lords of the clouds" as he calls them -- are "creating online environments in which true individuality is curtailed in favor of the extrication of marketing data and other intelligence."

He's also worried that this de-emphasis of individuality online feeds a certain rancor in internet culture, because "when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behavior." Further, says Jaron, the whole notion of "information wants to be free," devalues creativity. He writes: "Pop culture has entered into nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups." Net is, the return on remixing the old culture might exceed the return on creating anything new.

Predictably, Jaron's manifesto has resulted in backlash online -- apparently mostly from people who haven't actually read his book, instead simply reading an online summary of it. This, of course, underscores Jaron's concerns "about the demise of considered thought and the rising tyranny of first-impression reactions to complex ideas." But Glenn Reynolds takes issue with Jaron on one point, at least -- Glenn argues that the "social web" does in fact enable people to "collaborate, organize and socialize as never before," and that sites like Facebook and Twitter enable "tens of millions of people ... to express themselves in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago."

"Some people think the word of God should be free," says Steve Bercu, in a New York Times essay by Margo Rabb (12/20/09). Steve's explaining his theory of why the Bible is the most frequently stolen book at BookPeople, his bookstore in Austin, Texas. Steve also finds that staff-recommended books tend to get swiped. "It's so bad lately that I feel like our staff recommendation cards should read: 'BookPeople Bookseller recommends that you steal ___________.'"

At St. Mark's Bookshop in Manhattan's East Village, works of fiction -- by male authors -- tend to go missing: "This library of temptation includes books by Martin Amis, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Raymond Carver, Don DeLillo and Jack Kerouac, among others." Zack Zook, of BookCourt in Brooklyn, suggests this is because most of the shoplifters are young and male. "They think it's an existential rite of passage to steal their homeboy," he says.

Paul Auster, another oft-stolen author, admits he stole books when he was young, but now he's worried about bookstores going under. Others fret that the rise of digital books may exacerbate the problem. "The open-source culture is coming for us," says author Sherman Alexie, who has refused to digitize his work. But, in fact, "just "40 percent of books that are read are paid for, and only 28 percent are purchased new," according to consultant Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. "The rest are shared, borrowed, given away -- or stolen."

"Pearls embody how humans can trick Mother Nature into producing some of the world's most expensive objects," writes Stephen G. Bloom in "Tears of Mermaids," as reviewed by Joseph Sternberg in the Wall Street Journal (12/28/09). "A perfect natural pearl of extraordinary quality may be the product of one out of ten million oysters," Stephen explains. This, of course, is the reason pearls are so expensive, and until the late 1800s, only the very wealthy could afford them.

That began to change in 1888, when "Kokichi Mikimoto, the son of a poor noodle-maker in Japan, started a pearl farm that would eventually democratize the world pearl market. By the first decade of the 20th century, Mikimoto had perfected a technique for cultivating pearls, inserting a nucleus of North American mussel shell into an oyster that would then produce a pearl in as little as two years ... Cultured Japanese pearls took America by storm in the 1940s and '50s when homeward- bound GIs bought them for their wives and girlfriends."

It was kind of a no-brainer, since pearls, essentially, are just "accumulations of concentric layers of nacre, a compound of calcium carbonate that some mollusks ... produce to line the insides of their shells." But pearls also form a kind of "aesthetic rapport ... with their wearers, absorbing body heat and seeming to glow and reflect luminescence onto the skin." Today, Chinese entrepreneurs "have found ways to culture pearls in a species of mollusk that can produce more pearls per bivalve than the typical oyster," making pearls "cheaper and available in more varied colors" to more people than ever.

In Think Twice, Michael J. Mauboussin offers a gentle rebuke to Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, reports Susan Berfield in BusinessWeek (12/21/09). Where Malcolm endorsed "decisions made in the blink of an eye," Michael says this is advisable only if you practice "blinking" in a disciplined way. He also cautions that making decisions based on intuition works only in "stable environments, where conditions remain largely unchanged, where feedback is clear, and where cause-and-effect relationships are linear."

Citing psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Michael identifies two kinds of decision-making: One is "fast, automatic and difficult to control," while the other is "slower, serial and takes effort." So, while Michael believes it's possible to "train our gut to produce more reliable results," he also thinks "it's better ... simply to recognize the limits of intuition." He writes: "To make good decisions, you frequently must think twice -- and that's something our minds would rather not do." He also believes we tend to underestimate the role of the workplace itself in our decision-making.

As evidence, he cites a Harvard Business school study of "acclaimed equity analysts" over a ten-year period. The study found that the performance of these star analysts tended to decline as they moved to different firms. In other words, we tend to give too much credit to talent and not enough to circumstances. As Michael puts it: "We tend to observe financially successful companies and attach attributes ... to that success, and recommend that others embrace" the same attributes. But we're only deluding ourselves.