What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
To read a newspaper in Japan, a person needs to know three completely different writing systems used simultaneously — hiragana for native Japanese words, katakana for foreign loan-words, and kanji for concepts borrowed from Chinese roughly 1,500 years ago — plus romaji, the Latin alphabet Japanese schoolchildren learn to type their language into computers and phones
On the morning of December 26, 2004, a 10-year-old British girl named Tilly Smith was walking along Mai Khao Beach in Phuket, Thailand when she noticed the sea frothing and receding exactly as her geography teacher had taught her two weeks earlier — and her warning saved roughly 100 lives that morning
In 2014, a neuroscientist named Gregory Berns trained a group of dogs to lie completely still inside a functional MRI scanner and measured what happened in their brains when they smelled their owners — and the reward centers of the dogs' brains lit up more brightly for their owners than for any other scent, including the scent of other dogs in their own households
For almost 15 years, a retired psychology professor worked with his Border Collie Chaser for four to five hours a day — and by the time he stopped adding new toys because his house had run out of room, Chaser could correctly identify 1,022 different toys by their individual names
Stand up too fast and the stars filling your vision aren't imaginary — a brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the light-detecting cells sputter out phantom light
The word ‘spam’ for unwanted email comes from a 1970 Monty Python sketch set in a diner where every dish contained Spam — Spam and eggs, Spam and bacon, Spam and sausage — while Vikings at a nearby table chanted the name over and over, a joke internet users borrowed 20 years later
On an island in the Indian Ocean about the size of Manhattan, roughly 50 to 200 people known as the Sentinelese live in complete voluntary isolation — hunting with bows and arrows, speaking a language no outsider has ever understood, and killing every visitor who has come ashore, including an American missionary in 2018
Between 2002 and 2012, at least six people were killed in the Philippines while singing Frank Sinatra's 1969 song My Way at karaoke bars — a phenomenon that came to be known internationally as the My Way killings, and that prompted many Filipino karaoke bars to quietly remove the song from their playlists
When the American national soccer team arrived in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, its 11 players were a school teacher, a hearse driver, and a Haitian dishwasher from Manhattan who had never played together and had trained together only once — and on June 29 in Belo Horizonte, they beat the mighty English team 1 to 0
In 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for Antarctica with 28 men and a ship called the Endurance — and 22 months later, after the ship was crushed by pack ice and the men had lived on drifting ice floes and a barren island for nearly two years, every one of them came home alive
