What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
An Aboriginal Australian people of northern Queensland speak a language with no words for left or right — only for north, south, east, and west — so instead of asking you to move your left foot, they will ask you to move your east foot, and can point due north almost without thinking
A Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda continued fighting the Second World War in the Philippine jungle until 1974 because no one had reached him with orders to stop — when his former commanding officer finally flew in to relieve him personally, Onoda was 52 years old and had been at war for nearly 30 years
In villages in the mountains of Sardinia, men reach 100 nearly as often as women, unlike almost anywhere else in the developed world — and the popular explanation isn't diet or exercise, it's that nobody there retired into irrelevance"
The reason your mind wanders has nothing to do with discipline or willpower, and a study of 68 experiments found that the longer any task goes on, people increasingly think about something else regardless of how hard they try
Olive oil, soybeans, yogurt, lentils, and kimchi were named the five healthiest foods in the world by Health Magazine in 2006 — a distinction that put a spicy Korean fermented cabbage on the same shelf as the pillars of Mediterranean cuisine
The United Arab Emirates was once a small federation of fishermen, pearl divers, and camel herders on the Arabian Peninsula with no formal government and no paved roads — and 60 years later, it hosts the tallest building on earth, one of the world's largest airlines, and a per-capita GDP higher than Japan
Norway, a country of 5.5 million people that discovered oil off its coast in 1969, has built the world's largest sovereign wealth fund — worth more than $2 trillion in 2026 and holding stakes in roughly 1.5 percent of all publicly listed shares on the planet — meaning every Norwegian citizen effectively owns nearly $400,000 of the fund on paper
In 2021, Japan appointed a Minister for Loneliness — a Cabinet-level position officially responsible for developing national policy on social isolation — after years of speculation that isolation had become one of the country's most serious public-health issues
Tattoo ink doesn’t just stay in the skin — a PNAS mouse study found pigments can reach nearby lymph nodes soon after contact, damage macrophages, and keep inflammation active for at least two months
Japan has more than 33,000 businesses over 100 years old and roughly 3,000 over 200 years old — the highest concentration of ancient family businesses on earth — including a hotel called Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan that has been run by the same family since the year 705
