Among the more obscure paper he favors is sovereign debt of Colombia, Lebanon and the Dominican Republic.
"If you had told me that this obscure paper would ever become such a publicly visible and objectionable thing, I would have thought it more likely that Martians had just landed in Times Square," Sunstein said.
He takes time to tell the tragic story of a gifted young German scientist named Rudolf Kaufmann who wrote an obscure paper that described punctuated equilibrium by another name some 40 years before Mr. Eldredge did.
An obscure paper about an earthquake in 869 C.E. that destroyed a castle town in northeastern Japan and a subsequent tsunami that inundated the surrounding area is now at the center of a growing debate about how quickly scientific findings can and should influence disaster-mitigation policies.
In 1971, Bob coauthored an obscure paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Research describing Thottapalayam virus, a presumed arbovirus isolated from a shrew in India.
Delayed and obscure guidance, papers leaked online, mistakes in test papers and inconsistent moderation made this year unmanageable for school leaders, teachers, parents and pupils.
Writing our obscure little papers in our obscure little journals, blind to the fact that our research will only elucidate the trivial, or, even worse, the obvious.
One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers.
The decision was buried in an obscure consultation paper that was slipped out last month.
In Gordon-Reed's new book, "The Hemingses of Monticello," her single most revealing source is the memoir of Madison Hemings, printed by a newspaperman named S. F. Wetmore in an obscure Ohio paper called the Pike County Republican in 1873.
