What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter in late 2010 that his own children had not used the iPad, and that he limited technology at home, even as the tablet he had unveiled in San Francisco months earlier was on its way to selling hundreds of millions
The Moon has been three days away for more than half a century, and almost no one has stopped to ask what it will feel like when stops being the answer to "how far is the Moon" and starts being the answer to "how long is the flight"
Elite freedivers can hold their breath for more than eleven minutes on a single breath of air — and one oxygen-assisted record stands at nearly thirty. Most untrained people tap out well before ninety seconds
Within a single four-minute window on a football pitch in Mexico City in June of 1986, a five-foot-five Argentine named Diego Maradona scored the most notorious goal in World Cup history and then the most beautiful — both in the same match, both against England
For most of the past decade, the world's most-visited city has not been Paris, London, or New York — it has been Bangkok, which topped the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index in six of seven years through 2018 and hosted more international overnight visitors annually than any other city on Earth
In 1979, the Chinese city of Shenzhen was a fishing village of approximately thirty thousand people directly across the border from Hong Kong — and within a single generation, its population has grown to over seventeen million, and it is now home to some of the largest technology companies in the world including Huawei, Tencent, and BYD
When a Russian chemist named Dmitri Mendeleev laid out the sixty-three known chemical elements on a single sheet of paper in 1869, he deliberately left blank spaces for three elements he predicted would exist but had never been observed — and within the next seventeen years, all three were discovered exactly where he had left the gaps
The Braille alphabet, read today by blind people in almost every country on Earth, was invented in 1824 by a fifteen-year-old French student who had been blind since the age of three — arranging six raised dots in a pattern small enough to sit under a single fingertip, based on a code originally developed for the French army
KPMG ran an internal exam to certify staff on the ethical use of artificial intelligence — 28 employees were caught using artificial intelligence to cheat on it, including a partner who was fined $10,000
Across six studies of 1,874 people, researchers found that those who had lived abroad tended to have a clearer sense of who they were — and it was the time spent away, not the number of countries, that mattered
