I’m a poet, which means that when I’m not wishing I were a musician, I’m wishing I were a painter. There are lots of reasons to be jealous of painters. As a rule, people like them better than poets, and give them more money for what they make. So I've come up with a case for making contemporary poetry accessible to a wider public by putting it in museums and galleries.

The funniest thing about neuroscientist Tali Sharot’s recent book, The Optimism Bias, is also the saddest. It turns out that our struggle to picture the future we want and visualize ourselves 10 percent smarter than we are is redundant. We already overestimate our chances of happiness and success in life by a significant margin. That’s right—reality is even worse than we think it is.

Some questions, like “Who ate all the ice cream?” and “Did you stay in your pyjamas all day?” I prefer to leave unanswered. But quiz books—be they about the American civil war or Tintin—promise answers in this life. Highly knowable answers.