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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 1973, eight perfectly sane people had themselves committed to psychiatric hospitals to see if the doctors could tell, and what happened next humiliated an entire profession and changed psychiatry forever.
In 1974 in Ethiopia a team dug up a skeleton that pushed the human story back millions of years: 'Lucy,' about 3.2 million years old, showed that our ancestors walked upright long before they ever grew big brains
Quote of the day: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation.”
Nutmeg was once one of the most coveted spices on earth, grown on a single cluster of Indonesian islands, and the hunger for it helped redraw the map of the world — it's the reason New Amsterdam became New York, swapped away by the Dutch to close out England's last claim on a nutmeg island they already held
Ultra-processed foods now make up almost sixty percent of what the average American eats, and a tightly controlled study suggests that isn't really a matter of willpower — fed processed food, people ate five hundred extra calories a day without meaning to
In eighteenth-century Britain a single pineapple could cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars, so rare and coveted that people didn't eat them — they rented them, carrying the same fruit from party to party as a centerpiece to display their wealth
There's a group of seventeen obscure metals called the rare earths, tucked inside every smartphone, electric car, wind turbine, and guided missile — and a single country, China, mines about 70 percent of them and refines close to 90, a chokehold on modern technology few people realize exists
The blade that lay against King Tut's mummy for three thousand years turned out to be extraterrestrial — its metal matches the composition of meteorites, meaning the boy king was buried with a weapon forged from iron that fell from the sky
Jet pilots had a word for the feeling of coming loose from the earth at high altitude, and when two researchers put the question to 137 of them in the mid-1950s, 35 per cent said they had felt it and two-thirds of that group had never told another pilot
One country holds an estimated twenty-four trillion dollars in mineral wealth beneath its soil — cobalt and copper, the very metals that power the phones and electric cars of the modern world — and it remains among the five poorest nations on Earth
