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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson: “We spend the first year of a child's life teaching it to walk and talk and the rest of its life to shut up and sit down. There's something wrong there.”
Saudi Arabia’s NEOM is marketed as the city of the future, but it is being built on land with a long human past — including Huwaitat communities whose displacement has become one of the project’s darkest controversies
I put six minutes of birdsong through my headphones during the worst week of the year and something in my chest actually loosened
The handshake is said to have begun as proof of an empty hand, no weapon and no immediate threat, and for thousands of years that simple clasp has carried a message spoken greetings still cannot: I come in peace
Yawning may be the brain's way of cooling itself: in one experiment, people watching others yawn were far less likely to yawn when a cold pack was pressed to their forehead, but not when the pack was warm
Bhutan’s king voluntarily gave up absolute power and turned his kingdom into a democracy — but many of his people begged him not to, trusting the monarchy more than the politicians who would replace it
Sociologist Erving Goffman argued in 1956 that everyone runs a front stage and a back stage self, and that the strain most people feel in company is the cost of keeping the performance from slipping
In 1936, a British king gave up the throne for love, but the woman he chose, Wallis Simpson, was so unsuitable that the romance tore open the monarchy's rules from the inside
In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones invented a movement called The Third Wave to answer a student's question — and by day four, 200 teenagers were saluting him in the halls and informing on classmates who refused
The five Blue Zones share almost no genetics, no cuisine, and no religion — but every one of them walks, gardens, or farms into the ninth decade of life
