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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 the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch were among the shortest people in Europe. Today they remain among the tallest on the planet, with young men standing about 1.83 metres on average. Rising prosperity, better nutrition and improved healthcare added nearly 20 centimetres in roughly 150 years
That salmon on your sushi plate feels like an ancient Japanese tradition, but it isn't — until the 1990s the Japanese didn't eat raw salmon at all, and the reason they do now traces back to a Norwegian marketing campaign
When scientists first uncovered the ancient mummies of western China, their European-looking faces and fair hair suggested they were travelers who had wandered east from Europe — but their DNA told a stranger story: they were a local people who had lived there, isolated, for thousands of years
Houston spent nearly 3 billion dollars widening a single freeway to 26 lanes to kill its traffic — and within three years the drive was taking up to 51 per cent longer, proof of a rule planners keep relearning the hard way: you can't build your way out of a traffic jam
The highest-grossing entertainment franchise in the world isn't Star Wars, Marvel or Mickey Mouse — it's Pokémon, which began as a Japanese video game about collecting creatures and has since rung up north of a hundred billion dollars in retail sales
Most people can hold their breath underwater for a minute or two, but a people called the Bajau can spend up to five hours a day underwater, diving to depths that would unnerve a scuba diver — and scientists have traced the ability to a change written into their very DNA
Psychology suggests who you end up close to isn't decided by looks or shared passions — it's proximity, plain nearness, because liking tends to grow for whoever we simply keep seeing, again and again
For nearly a century, absinthe was banned across the Western world as a hallucinogen that drove artists to madness — then chemists tested the old pre-ban bottles and found nothing special at all, no secret in the wormwood, just an unusually strong liquor that people drank far too much of
On the island of Sardinia there's a cheese so extreme it's been outlawed across Europe — a pecorino deliberately left open for flies to lay their eggs in, so that by the time it reaches the table it's alive with thousands of tiny maggots, eaten while they're still squirming
The densest place that has ever been measured on Earth was a single Hong Kong block where 33,000 people lived stacked in six and a half acres — a self-built maze of 350 towers raised without a single architect, so tightly packed that sunlight never reached the lowest floors
