I lived in Boston in the 1980s, and I spoke with a pastor of a major church there. We were reflecting on the ways the church doesn't always recognize the culture cultivators and creators in its midst. This pastor said, "There's a woman in our church who was the lead litigator for the Environmental Protection Agency for the clean up of Boston Harbor. It's occurred to me since then that she played this ...

In their book Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explain how a simple change to U. S. tax rules in 1987 exposed the depth of the public's willingness to deceive for financial gain:

In the 1980s, an I.R.S. research officer in Washington named John Szilagyi had seen enough random audits to know that some taxpayers were incorrectly claiming dependants for the sake of exemption. Sometimes ...