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I must really be stoopid, I answered 5 cents and 47 days with very little effort, in the later case virtually no effort. (It took me longer to "reason" that the hook was to answer 24 days, before I read the "solution", than to identify the answer.) My first reaction to the first one was, "It's not 10 cents." But then, I don't read the New Yorker anymore.

Was it Voltaire who said something to the effect that men resort to reason, only when impulse and intuition have failed?

Of course, people who think the way "thinking" is described in the article, believe that the only reason anyone would vote against Obama is racism, and need never examine their assumptions. They are called Ivy Leaguers. BTW, Richard Feynmann was not so much brilliant, as stubborn, he got his Nobel be re-examining the assumptions of previous researchers. Einstein's son said that his father would never really strike you a brilliant in a conversation, but that his one distinguishing trait was the compunction to understand things for himself, not to take anyone else's word for anything.