What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
When Norway peacefully separated from Sweden in the autumn of 1905 after 91 years of union, a referendum asked the entire Norwegian male population whether they wanted independence — and 368,208 men voted yes while only 184 voted no, a margin of 99.95 percent that remains one of the most lopsided referendums in recorded history
Researchers found that on days people did more small kind things for others, the usual toll of stress on their mood and mental health tended to be noticeably softened
There is a language on a small Spanish island in the Canary archipelago that is made entirely of whistles, can carry a full sentence across six miles of mountain ravine, and is still taught to every child in school
When Israel's first president died in 1952, the new nation offered the presidency to Albert Einstein — who turned it down, writing that he had neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions
Researchers compared 5,556 people across 10 nations and found that parents tended to report a little more meaning and purpose in life — though their day-to-day happiness looked virtually the same as non-parents
Demographers estimate that about 117 billion members of our species have ever been born, which means the roughly 8 billion of us alive today are about 7% of everyone who has ever lived
We tend to think real connection value only comes from close friends and family, but researchers found that brief, ordinary exchanges with near-strangers — the barista, the person on the train — measurably raise happiness and a sense of belonging
The first McDonald's ever to open in the Soviet Union welcomed 38,000 Russians on January 31, 1990 — a queue that snaked for kilometres through the freezing centre of Moscow and lasted up to 6 hours, 22 months before the country itself would cease to exist
Before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492, Italian cooking had no tomatoes, Irish cooking had no potatoes, Swiss chocolate did not exist, and Thai cuisine had no chili peppers — each of those ingredients grew on a continent the other half of humanity had not yet found
Quote by Walter Cronkite: “Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”
