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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
A seven-member South Korean boy band named BTS has contributed close to $50 billion to South Korea's economy across the first decade of its existence, a share of the country's GDP comparable to that of a major Korean airline — and the small Korean entertainment label that signed them in 2013 nearly went bankrupt before their debut
A Yale study found that how you think about getting older may add 7.5 years to your life, more than exercise and more than not smoking
Personality tests remain among the most widely used tools in hiring and therapy despite decades of research showing limited ability to predict how a person actually behaves
The bandwagon effect: a belief doesn't have to be true to spread, it just has to look popular — and the more people who hold it, the more believable it seems to everyone watching
A nationwide study of people with chronic illness found that those who prayed daily were 48% more likely to survive over the following 6 years, after controlling for depression, social support, and health behaviors
Researchers stopped people to ask for directions, swapped in a different man while a door passed between them — and fewer than half noticed the person they were talking to had changed
Lessons on routine from some of history's greatest minds
The Lascaux cave paintings of southwestern France sat sealed beneath a hillside for 17,000 years before being discovered in September 1940 — when an 18-year-old French boy walking his dog watched the dog disappear down a hole left by an uprooted tree, climbed in after, and found himself surrounded by walls of painted bulls and horses
Post-it Notes were invented in 1968 by a chemist named Spencer Silver trying to develop a super-strong aerospace adhesive — and the weak glue he accidentally produced instead sat unused for six years until a colleague named Art Fry needed something to anchor the bookmarks in his church hymnal
The Taj Mahal was built by an Indian emperor named Shah Jahan as a tomb for his late wife — and the project cost so much that his own son seized the throne and imprisoned him for the last eight years of his life in a fortress approximately 2.5 kilometres upstream along the same river, where his only view was the tomb itself
