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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
Bangladesh was once dismissed as a "basket case." Today it is a lower-middle-income economy, transformed in large part by a garment industry that employed millions of women and, so the story goes, turned cheap clothing into a national ladder out of poverty
The biggest club soccer matches draw audiences that dwarf most American sports finals — and only recently have U.S. investors begun treating soccer not as a niche, but as the world’s dominant sports market
Loneliness among older adults isn't rare — surveys find nearly half of people over 60 report it, and the standard advice to join a club rarely touches the pattern underneath
Good people are usually excellent at the responding half of connection — validating, listening, making others feel seen — while never offering anything vulnerable of their own, which is why they feel unknown in a room full of people who like them
The idea that you learn best as a 'visual' or 'auditory' learner is one of education's most stubborn myths: decades of studies find that matching lessons to a supposed style makes little difference to how much we actually learn
Money can buy happiness, it turns out, if you spend it on someone else: in experiments and in survey data from 136 countries, people who spent on others reported a bigger lift in mood than those who spent it on their own wants
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Remember that all is opinion"
A Yale researcher found that people with a positive view of ageing lived roughly 7.5 years longer than those who didn't, a figure Yale itself framed as beating exercise and not smoking
In 2023, researchers placed a GPS collar on a young bull elephant in Zambia. Two years later, his path stretched across four countries and six national parks, revealing the ancient routes elephants still remember, and the human borders now cutting through them
In 2019, Victor Vescovo made the deepest solo dive in human history, descending nearly 11 kilometres into the Challenger Deep, and at the bottom of the ocean he reported seeing what looked like a plastic bag
