Fraternities breed leaders. That, at least, is what most any chapter website will tell you, in not so many words - and the message certainly makes for a compelling rationale for joining the Greek system.

I thought poker might be a perfect environment to start to learn probabilistic decision-making, and to live what it means to have skill versus chance and to see how that played out. I would dive in head first into the poker world.

People want to protect their way of life, and when they think it's in danger they start grasping for more extreme-seeming alternatives.

While today's fraternities are hardly the literary- and debate-inspired groups of yore, their core mission - or, at the least, their ideal core mission and the one touted loudly in their public chapter and promotional materials - remains largely unchanged.

Las vegas shouldn't exist. The incongruity hits you from the moment you first glimpse it from the airplane. First mountains, then desert, then neat squares of identical houses that look as if they were plucked straight from Monopoly.

Play up the outrage factor and suddenly groups bond together like never before - and prepare to attack like never before.

I don't think anyone could have predicted that I would have gone in less than a year from not knowing how many cards were in a deck to winning a major poker title.

I've been studying, playing, living, breathing poker for eight to nine hours a day. Every day! When I'm between events and in New York, I'm reading, watching videos or live-streaming very good players.

I really had to go back and remind myself that trusting makes society function on an individual level related to health and on a social level related to economic growth and development.

To the untrained eye, poker seems deceptively easy.

Poker is all about comfort with uncertainty, after all.

As our understanding of fraud evolves, we might one day be able to develop predictive algorithms that could identify would-be con artists based on patterns of behavior.

The perfectibility of the human mind is a theme that has captured our imagination for centuries - the notion that, with the right tools, the right approach, the right attitude, we might become better, smarter versions of ourselves.

Electrodes aren't the only things we may someday start implanting in our brains. Consider what you could do with a chip in your head that linked directly to the Internet: Within milliseconds, you could retrieve just about any piece of information.

Down the road, the most controversial approach to neuroenhancement could be a way not of stimulating the brain but of reengineering it.

Creating groups is easy - but to make them meaningful and lasting, you have to give them a common identity that not only unites them but shows them why they are unique.

Once fraternities became tied to power and leadership, the powerful and would-be-leaders wanted to join.

Gender perception can be a pernicious thing: Where a lack of warmth passes in a male, in a woman, it's deadly.

It's not at all a far jump to think that overall perceptions of gender - and what is and is not important in gender roles - would carry over from life to fiction.

The goals of literature are multifold, but creating nice, positive protagonists that you'd want to grab drinks with or invite home to mom can hardly be considered one of them.

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist.

Cloud Atlas' is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.

There will be great books. There will be great films. Sometimes, if we are lucky, the two will intersect.

I can understand pulling a book whose contents have been questioned - after all, false information has a way of sticking in your brain and seeming true when you go to retrieve it years later.

An e-book is not a physical book. That point might seem trite until you stop for a moment to think how much simpler it is, in a certain sense, to destroy electronic than physical traces.

For as long as writers have written, they've had second thoughts about their work.

Of course, authors can still burn their manuscripts - but once something is out in the world, especially if it ever saw the digital light of day, it's harder and harder to call it back.

At the end, we can embrace and love whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it.

In the world of speeches and orations, especially historical ones, the persistent misquotation is understandable. You hear a speech. You misremember or mishear a line as something more colorful than it was.

The more fluent the experience of reading a quote - or the easier it is to grasp, the smoother it sounds, the more readily it comes to mind--the less likely we are to question the actual quotation.

To a child, 'The Little Prince' is the story of a boy who falls from the sky, meets lots of funny people on his travels, and then returns to his star. But take a closer look and you find as clear a commentary on everything that's wrong with modern life - and what can be done to fix it - as you would in the most biting social satire.

Researchers have always tried to use psychology for predictive ends: Can what we already know about a person tell us how she will behave in a given situation? The results of these endeavors have been mixed.

Finding the one right candidate in a group is hard, and companies don't have much time to figure out exactly which questions can help them tell similar-seeming candidates apart.

The last thing in the world I want to do is write something in memory of Walter Mischel. I still can't quite accept that he's gone. And so I procrastinate, and with every day I don't put pen to paper, I reinforce his life's work with my reluctance.

Humans are the most complicated, nuanced things that exist. We can't be reduced to labels or summed up with five traits - even if they are the Big Five.

We've progressed well beyond the four humors in the two thousand-odd years since Hippocrates, but we still haven't satisfied the urge to discover ways of sorting people into personalities and types and, in so doing, predict how they might act in specific situations.

No one is ever bias-free, but some people let their biases influence their actions more than others.

If someone in a powerful position acts in a certain way or expresses a certain view, we implicitly assume that those actions and views are associated with power, and that emulating them may be to our advantage.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

Incongruous information is discarded, and supporting information is eagerly retained. Our memory actually ends up skewed: we are better able to process and recall the facts that we are motivated to process and recall, while conveniently forgetting those that we would prefer weren't true.

We tend to dismiss things we don't particularly like, or that we find disturbing, as aberrations.

Thinking about time travel may seem like something humans have been doing since the first caveman dropped the first rock on his foot. But, even to begin to imagine the possibility of time travel, your mind must be able to wrap itself around the notion of a past and a future.

Not only is the past of a person with no memory inaccessible; his ability to think about the future is imperilled. Time travel, then, is ultimately - and paradoxically - an exercise in remembering. And without that capacity it simply cannot exist.

Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

The U.S. has some of the most significant income inequality in the developed world, yet people seem routinely to underestimate that fact.

At least in the U.S., the party you believe in plays a big role in how you conceive of yourself. It feels good to think that your party is smarter, and that the smarts are what drive people to your party.

And, when it comes to politics, it can be awfully difficult to put your desires aside and to acknowledge that the world is a much messier place, where open-minded people might be conservative and liberals may well be conscientious.

I've figured out how to turn what's different about me and limitations - I'm new to this world, I'm a woman, I don't have a math background - and how I use that to my advantage. They're what make me unique. In poker you learn very quickly, if you play like everyone else, you'll be fine, but you'll never be great.

I find the game fascinating and poker has unlocked parts of me emotionally. I'm enjoying the process but there are moments when I'm really down. It's a ton of travel, it's exhausting, physically and emotionally. It's lonely.

Erik Seidel ended up introducing me to some of the best players in the world, a few of whom also agreed to take me on to coach me. So I had access to the best poker minds in the world to help me study and figure things out.