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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Dermatologists have long documented that the expressions worn most often across a lifetime eventually stop leaving the face and start staying — thousands of repetitions of the same smile, frown, or squint pulling the same muscles until the skin above them slowly loses the ability to return to neutral
When Singapore became independent in 1965 it had no natural resources, no hinterland, and fewer than 2 million people. Sixty years later its GDP per capita is higher than that of the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australia
Ireland spent most of the 20th century watching its young people leave for work in London and Boston — and 40 years later, their descendants started coming home to work at the European operations of Apple, Google, and Pfizer, in a country whose GDP per capita now ranks higher than Germany's
Saudi Arabia knows the day is coming when the world stops needing oil — and its Public Investment Fund is a bet placed by one generation on behalf of the next, spending the last decades of oil revenue on hotels, football leagues, and entire cities in the empty desert, so the grandchildren of today's leaders inherit a country worth having
Daniel Kahneman spent a lifetime studying judgment and distilled one warning into a single sentence: "Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it"
Cats sleep between 12 and 16 hours a day not because they are lazy but because their hunting strategy requires explosive short-burst energy — and a body that can sprint at nearly 50 kilometres per hour needs most of the day to prepare for a few seconds of effort
Every Antarctic winter, male emperor penguins stand for more than two months in temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius, balancing a single egg on their feet — and eating nothing the entire time
A Yale psychologist asked 660 older adults in Ohio how they felt about growing older, then tracked them for more than 20 years, and found those with a positive view of aging lived about 7.5 years longer than those who dreaded it
In Cantonese, changing the pitch of a single syllable can change a word's meaning completely — and languages like it are significantly more common near the equator than in colder, drier parts of the world, a pattern linguists have tentatively linked to humidity's effect on the vocal cords
South Korean women are projected to become the first population in recorded human history to cross an average life expectancy of 90 years by 2030 — a threshold that researchers at the turn of this century considered impossible for any group of people to reach
