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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 reporter spent nearly a year combing through more than 25,000 pages of private documents handed over by a former campaign insider — a paper trail now reshaping how Washington views one of its rising figures
When Gabbard entered Congress in 2013 she became the first Hindu American to serve as a US Representative, and she swore her oath on the Bhagavad Gita rather than a Bible
The tomb chamber of China's first emperor has never been opened in the 2,200 years since his death in 210 BC — sealed beneath a 76-metre pyramid mound outside Xi'an, surrounded by 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers discovered in 1974 by farmers digging a well, and described by ancient texts as containing rivers of mercury that modern soil readings around the mound have now quietly confirmed
A battery does not store electricity in the way most people imagine — it stores chemical energy, and every time your phone turns on, it is harvesting a controlled imbalance between materials trying to trade electrons
A viral social media stat claims 70% of Gen Z and Millennials can't relax because they were taught rest is wasteful — the number isn't real, but the research behind it is
You cannot tickle yourself, no matter how you try, because your brain predicts the touch of your own hand and cancels the sensation before you feel it
In 1898 a psychologist had children crank a fishing reel as fast as they could, first alone and then beside a rival, and about half sped up when someone was racing them — the first experiment in social psychology
Patients in the late stages of Alzheimer's who no longer recognize their own children can often still sing along, word for word, to songs they loved when they were young — because the brain regions that store musical memory are among the last the disease destroys, in one of the quietest mercies neuroscience has ever found
The 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has been famously interpreted by economic historians as a political allegory about American monetary policy in the 1890s — with the yellow brick road representing the gold standard and Dorothy's silver slippers, changed to ruby in the 1939 film, representing a competing movement to back the dollar with silver
Olive oil flavoured with oregano was recovered from clay jars sealed inside a Greek merchant ship that sank in the Aegean roughly 2,400 years ago during the lifetime of Socrates — meaning the salad dressing sitting on a table at your nearest Mediterranean uses roughly the same recipe
