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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke machine in his home city of Kobe using a tape recorder, a coin box, and an amplifier — and by not bothering to patent his invention because he thought he had merely combined other people's parts, he lost roughly 100 million dollars a year in royalties
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first batch of 3,000 units sold out online in 20 minutes — and today, more than 800 of those same AIBOs have been given traditional Buddhist funerals at a 450-year-old temple in Chiba Prefecture, where a priest chants sutras for the peaceful transition of their souls
Between 1849 and 1874, roughly 100,000 Chinese men from Guangdong province were shipped to Peru under contracts they could not read, to work the coastal guano islands and the sugar plantations — and the fusion cuisine their descendants would eventually create is why the city of Lima today has more than 6,000 Chinese-Peruvian restaurants called chifas
After the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis nearly bankrupted South Korea, the government decided to rebuild the country through culture instead of manufacturing — and by 2022 a nation of 51 million was earning $12 billion a year in music, film, television, and cosmetics
After the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the winter of 1939 expecting an easy victory in 2 weeks, the Finns held them off for 105 days in temperatures that fell below minus 40 degrees — including a single farmer-turned-sniper named Simo Häyhä who killed more than 500 Soviet soldiers in 100 days without ever using a telescopic sight
When Norway peacefully separated from Sweden in the autumn of 1905 after 91 years of union, a referendum asked the entire Norwegian male population whether they wanted independence — and 368,208 men voted yes while only 184 voted no, a margin of 99.95 percent that remains one of the most lopsided referendums in recorded history
Researchers found that on days people did more small kind things for others, the usual toll of stress on their mood and mental health tended to be noticeably softened
There is a language on a small Spanish island in the Canary archipelago that is made entirely of whistles, can carry a full sentence across six miles of mountain ravine, and is still taught to every child in school
When Israel's first president died in 1952, the new nation offered the presidency to Albert Einstein — who turned it down, writing that he had neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions
Researchers compared 5,556 people across 10 nations and found that parents tended to report a little more meaning and purpose in life — though their day-to-day happiness looked virtually the same as non-parents
