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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 have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn't from doing too much, it's from never once letting the mind go quiet
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most important work
Sam Altman said he was 'pretty wrong' about the jobs apocalypse — and 'roughly right' about everything else — four days after OpenAI filed for a trillion-dollar IPO
Brain scans of new fathers show measurable changes — which might explain why so many dads describe the first year of parenthood as feeling like learning to be a different person
Psilocybin research is no longer just for hard-to-treat cases — a new trial targeted recurrent depression in people who had not failed standard treatment, and the results are promising
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone's seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered virtual-reality wings — flapping to stay aloft, swerving through rings, swatting falling balls — and by the end, their brains were processing images of wings the same way they process images of real human limbs
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."
75% of Americans say they would trust AI shopping recommendations less if results were sponsored — which means OpenAI just made a decision that could structurally damage the thing that makes it valuable
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I'm most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn't the worst part
