Some interesting articles

Benjamin Friedman reviews'Animal Spirits' in The Failure of the Economy & the Economists.
Richard C. Lewontin reviews in Why Darwin? several Darwin Books and also mentions some of the background:
"The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).
2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).
3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).
It seems amazing that two naturalists could independently arrive at the same articulated theory of evolution from a consideration of the characteristics of some species of organisms in nature, their geographic distribution, and their similarities to other species. This amazement becomes considerably tempered, however, when one considers the social consciousness and economic milieu in which the theory arose, a milieu marked by the rise of competitive industrial capitalism in which individuals rose in the social hierarchy based, presumably, on their greater entrepreneurial fitness."

Jonah Lehrer on the secret of self-control in Don’t!The secret of self-control. Sample passage:
"Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”"
More discussion in Lehrer's blog The Secret of Self-Control.

Malcom GladwellHow David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.

Jonah Lehrer onHow creativity springs from a choreographed set of mental events.