What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
The modern 8-hour workday is usually traced to Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and social reformer, who in 1817 popularized the formula: ‘eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.’ Does this split still make sense in 2026?
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called early hunter-gatherer societies "the original affluent society" — not because they had more than us, but because they wanted less than they had, and worked the minimum required to meet what they wanted
Sam Altman asked what problem people most hope AI will solve — and the answer that keeps coming up isn't cancer or climate change
The war in Ukraine has become the world's largest live test of autonomous drone warfare — and what both sides have learned in four years is quietly rewriting how every military on Earth thinks about the future of combat
Modern retirement was invented in 1889 by a 74-year-old German Chancellor named Otto von Bismarck, who set the eligible age at 70 in a country where the average male life expectancy at birth was around 40
Dante imagined a catastrophic planetary impact in striking geological detail 500 years before science understood how asteroids work — and it took a researcher reading the Inferno to notice
Apple just rolled out hearing tests on AirPods Pro and hypertension alerts on Apple Watch to a new wave of countries — including India, Italy, and Taiwan — putting clinical-grade health screening in the pockets of users in more than 160 countries around the world
Why are so many of us still awake at midnight watching something we don’t even care about? Researchers call it “revenge bedtime procrastination” — a self-regulation failure driven by a need to reclaim the autonomy a demanding day took away
The international space station has had continuous human presence for over twenty-five years. The daily habits that made that possible are almost embarrassingly ordinary, which is perhaps precisely why they work
NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock said the thing he missed in orbit was the smell of grass and trees and on his return he found those ordinary aromas "intoxicating". Most of us have never stopped to notice we have them
