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Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The IKEA effect in the age of AI
The Great Wall of China is not actually visible from space with the naked eye — astronauts from Apollo to the ISS have confirmed it — and the popular myth that it is predates space travel itself, with the best-known version coming from a 1932 Ripley's Believe It or Not cartoon
I've been studying emotion regulation for 6 years, and I think the most practical skill you can learn is to notice your nervous system before your mind starts writing tragic fiction.
The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in whether it's conscious and the more interested I am in what happens to human consciousness around it
Thought of the day from French philosopher Blaise Pascal: "The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"
Neuroscientists found a region of the brain specialized for recognising faces that activates in as little as 50 milliseconds and it develops even in people who have been blind since birth
The case for jotting down a few things we are grateful for
The first fax machine was invented in 1843 — more than thirty years before the telephone — which means that for a 22-year window in the mid-1800s, a Japanese samurai could have theoretically sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln, since the samurai class was not formally abolished until 1867 and Lincoln died in 1865
In 1938, Harvard researchers began following a group of young men to learn what makes a good life. Almost nine decades on, the strongest finding in their data is not wealth or achievement, but something quieter.
Almost all the gold on Earth — every wedding ring, every coin, every gram in every bank vault — was forged in the collision of dead stars billions of years ago, in events so violent that a single one can produce hundreds of Earth-masses of gold, and the heavy elements were then scattered across the galaxy before our sun was even born
