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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
We tend to view happiness as a reward for hard work and success, but a review of the evidence suggested the arrow may point the other way — happiness often comes first, then shapes work, love and health
An email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" infected 45 million computers in 24 hours after it was released in May 2000 — disabling email systems at the Pentagon, the CIA, and most of the world's largest corporations — and the 23-year-old Filipino college dropout who wrote it now runs a phone repair booth in Manila, never prosecuted because cybercrime was not yet illegal in the Philippines
Around 40% of US teens are online 'almost constantly' — nearly double the share a decade ago — yet nearly half of them say social media is mostly bad for people their age
A 2020 study in Sweden found that dogs can sense heat and thermal radiation with the tip of their nose — meaning they can detect a warm object across a room even with their eyes closed — making them only the second mammal on Earth known to possess this ability, alongside the vampire bat, which uses it to find blood vessels beneath the skin of sleeping prey
The people of Okinawa, Japan only eat until they are about 80 percent full, then stop — and the practice has been linked in multiple peer-reviewed studies to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, slower biological aging, and a measurable extension of healthy lifespan, in one of the simplest evidence-backed longevity practices ever identified
In 1932, the Australian government deployed soldiers with two machine guns and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to wage war on roughly 20,000 emus destroying wheat crops in Western Australia — and after weeks of campaign, the soldiers had killed only a few hundred birds, in the only war on record in which birds officially won
When 61 UK companies cut the working week to four days with no cut in pay, the worry was probably output — but revenue stayed roughly flat, burnout fell for 71% of staff, and 56 of the 61 firms decided not to go back
A cluttered desk might not feel like a big deal, but some research suggests competing objects in your visual field suppress activity in the visual cortex, making it harder to focus
More than two-thirds of the world's people now live in countries having too few children to hold their populations steady — a quiet reversal, crossed gradually over the past two decades, that demographers say will reshape economies, cities and old age within a single lifetime.
Why did students paid one dollar to call a boring task enjoyable end up believing it, while those paid twenty dollars did not?
