What's up in
Mind & Meaning
The psychology of ambition, isolation, and meaning under extremes — and what frontier life teaches us about being human.
HSBC paid nearly $2 billion in 2012 after investigators found that Mexican drug-cartel money had moved through its banking system for years — hidden not in suitcases, but inside hundreds of billions of dollars in wire transfers
Australia has the world's largest population of wild camels — roughly a million animals roaming the outback — and because they've never been exposed to the diseases that plague captive herds in the Middle East, Gulf nations pay a premium to import them as some of the cleanest breeding stock in the trade.
Sweden imported nearly three million tonnes of other countries' garbage in a single year — and got paid to take it, at roughly 373 krona a tonne, because burning it produces heat for over a million homes
No male population on Earth grew taller last century than Iranian men, who gained 16.5 centimetres between the 1896 and 1996 birth cohorts, while the same study found places where people ended up shorter than those born decades earlier
There's a difference between being liked and being known — one is about smoothing yourself into a shape people can hold, the other is about staying whole enough that some people can't
The habit of laughing at your own hard stories before anyone else can react isn't resilience, it's often a decades-old strategy for controlling how much sympathy the room is allowed to offer you
Encyclopaedia Britannica recently introduced English speakers to fjaka, the Dalmatian art of doing absolutely nothing, and if the word sounds unfamiliar, the feeling won't, it's the same skill the Dutch spent years building an entire wellness trend around and calling niksen.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: "Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains… For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul."
Quote by Carl Jung: "The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no universal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him — an irrational form which no other can outbid."
Despite Costa Rica having wider income inequality than the United States on the standard measure, its least advantaged citizens outlive Americans in the same position — which is the part researchers cannot fully explain
