Katie Hafner Quotations

When Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, got divorced two years ago, she noticed that a cluster of her friends were splitting up at around the same time.

Using the HTTP protocol, computer scientists around the world began making the Internet easier to navigate by inventing point-and-click browsers. One browser in particular, called Mosaic, created in 1993 at the University of Illinois, would help popularize the Web, and therefore the Net, as no software tool had yet done.

'Unexpected Legacy' reports the findings of the California Children of Divorce Study, which began in 1971, a year after the nation's first no-fault divorce law was imposed in California. Wallerstein was the principal investigator on the study.

The story of the Web starts in 1980, when Berners-Lee, a young consulting physicist at the CERN physics laboratory near Geneva, grew frustrated with existing methods for finding and transferring information.

Stacey Napp understands the ugly side of divorce - which is often the side that involves money. In fact, she understands it so well that in 2008 she started a business, Balance Point Divorce Funding, which invests in divorce and probate litigation, helping clients cover costs in exchange for a share of the winnings.

Speaking as the child of divorce, I have to say that one of the most disconcerting findings in 'The Longevity Project' focused on divorce: On average, grown children of divorced parents died almost five years earlier than children from intact families.

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

McDermott and two colleagues - James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard University - published a paper titled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too.' Their study shows that divorce can spread like a virus among friends, siblings and co-workers.

Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge - tacit, nonscientific knowledge - and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design.

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there.