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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
When the American national soccer team arrived in Brazil for the 1950 World Cup, its 11 players were a school teacher, a hearse driver, and a Haitian dishwasher from Manhattan who had never played together and had trained together only once — and on June 29 in Belo Horizonte, they beat the mighty English team 1 to 0
In 1914, the British explorer Ernest Shackleton set sail from London for Antarctica with 28 men and a ship called the Endurance — and 22 months later, after the ship was crushed by pack ice and the men had lived on drifting ice floes and a barren island for nearly two years, every one of them came home alive
For the 2014 film Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan hired Caltech physicist Kip Thorne as his science consultant — and the visual simulations Thorne helped design for the film's black hole were so mathematically accurate that they generated two peer-reviewed scientific papers and became the model for how astrophysicists visualize black holes today
During the Second World War, the American company Hormel shipped more than 100 million pounds of canned Spam to Allied soldiers on every front from the Pacific islands to the Soviet Red Army — and after the war, Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that without American Spam, the Soviet Union would not have been able to feed its army
In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener proposed that the continents of the Earth had once been joined and were slowly drifting apart — a theory geologists ridiculed for the next 50 years, until three decades after his death, when new evidence from the ocean floor proved him right
Psychologist Roy Baumeister ran a large study on what separates a happy life from a meaningful one, and the divide is sharper than you'd expect: happiness comes from getting what you want, but meaning comes from what you give, whether you spend your days taking or contributing
A genetic analysis of nearly 700,000 people identified 74 distinct locations in the human genome tied to anxiety, 39 of which had never been linked to the condition before
Physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn't something the brain produces, but that explaining it will require physics we haven't yet discovered
Psychologist Erich Fromm argued there are two ways to live, and the difference decides everything — not having more, but being more, whether you cling to what you own or grow into what you are
Stoic philosopher Epictetus taught that peace turns on one distinction, and it isn't optimism — it's the dichotomy of control, learning to want only what is already yours to give
