“Workers who have frequent intense or emotionally charged interactions with others are more susceptible to burnout.

“Software work is either trivial or boring, and most often trivial and boring. Actually doing it, in most cases, would take seconds, but these seconds are so traumatically dull that they require long bouts of recuperation in between. The only way to save your soul in software is not to do anything.

“Sun isn’t even open enough to give the OpenSolaris community enough documentation to support their own new machines.

“There is nothing so tiring as pretending to work.

“I work as a software engineer, which means that I get paid a rather large amount of money to do very little.

“At least buyers of used cars and tract housing can resell them to the next ignorant buyer. Companies are generally stuck with their custom software.

“The free market is socialism for the rich—free markets for the poor and state protection for the rich.

“Consider two countries A and B that trade in two goods. One striking result of the theory of comparative advantage: Even if A is technologically superior to B in producing both goods, one of the two industries in A will go out of business in an atmosphere of free trade.

“Mercantilism is an economic theory that holds that the prosperity of a nation depends upon its supply of capital, and that the global volume of trade is unchangeable.

“In the 1930s Marc Bloch painted a complex and nuanced portrait of medieval society in which feudal relations played but a part. More importantly, he decentered feudalism from analysis of medieval society.

The program of study outlined by Bloch has dominated medieval studies until today. By the 1970s, feudalism had, by and large, disappeared from scholarly discourse, but, paradoxically, not from textbooks or the classroom. It was only a matter of time before someone pointed this out. But medievalists are a conservative lot and continued working as before. This is where Reynolds comes in. Susan Reynolds completes the quiet revolution begun by Marc Bloch.