The recent epic failure in rationing superlatives reminds us that hyperbole should be saved for the best of the best   One of the things that makes language fascinating is that it’s always evolving. Just sometimes, we need to intervene with that evolution, do a 360 and start a...

14 Lessons From Benjamin Franklin   Benjamin Franklin was a man of action. Over his lifetime, his curiosity and passion fueled a diverse range of interests. He was a writer (often using a pseudonym), publisher, diplomat, inventor and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His...

Too much of a good thing … positive feelings can lead to hasty judgments and stagnation The happier you are, the better, right? Not necessarily. Studies show there is a darker side to feeling good and the pursuit of happiness can sometimes make you … well, less happy. Too much...

On March 24th, surveillance cameras at the Taylor Made Jewelry store in Akron, Ohio captured the startling image of a red SUV crashing through the front windows with two masked men jumping out, smashing display cases, and stealing over $100,000 of jewelry in less than 2 minutes. Both men are...

Exploring the role of social media in perpetuating the culture of fear.  How do those using social media leverage fear?  How is fear spread through social media?  When and where can technology combat fear?  What are the social costs of that fear? 1. We live in a culture of fear. 2. The...

Eastern Europe isn’t known as a mecca for healthy living. Those who haven’t visited Eastern Europe might still imagine that it’s filled with smoking teenagers and obese babushkas. Although that still exists, Eastern Europeans have some healthy practices that we could all learn from. For...

People usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world   So, over the past few months I’ve been talking to tons of entrepreneurs about the tools that curators actually need and I’ve identified seven things. First, who does curation?...

Curators: not just for museums anymore? “The promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the rolling plenitude of information. It’s the ability of individuals to choreograph that information in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the gravitational...

Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think...

“Do you think we should get our brains scanned before getting married?”   It’s not an outrageous question.  It’s the kind of questions that will help us to learn more about how our minds act in the world, while still keeping the world in mind. Technology and science have now...

IN A CULTURE that favors sensation, the fact checker is an anomaly, perhaps even anathema. He is the brakes on editors and writers racing toward deadline intent on dazzling readers at the expense of edifying them. He is the schoolmarm tsk tsking. He is the public defender for the...

Upper class people are more likely to behave selfishly, studies suggest Higher social classes more likely to lie, cheat, cut up other road users and not stop at pedestrian crossings, say researchers. A raft of studies into unethical behaviour across the social classes has delivered a withering...

Living alone doesn’t mean being lonely   “Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone ” by Eric Klinenberg “Going Solo” examines a dramatic demographic trend: the startling increase in adults living alone. Along the way, the book navigates some...

Piotr Czerski is a Polish writer and commentator. Here, he lays out the kind of political/literary manifesto that seems to pop up from time to time, usually in Europe. The essay, as translated by Marta Szreder, was posted to Pastebin under a Creative Commons license. I repost it here with the...

Cancer is a disease of the body’s cells that affects around half of all Australians by the age of 85. Normally cells grow and multiply in a controlled way. But if something causes a mistake to occur in the cells’ genetic blueprints, this control can be lost. There are a number of...

We’re often blind to the not-so-wonderful traits we possess—but quick to point them out in others   Has someone said you’re acting like a jerk (or worse) in social situations?   Here are 6 reasons why you may have earned this title: 1.  You only talk about yourself....

One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley was a class on cognitive science from the famed linguist George Lakoff. The course was essentially just us reading through his classic book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind...

Your daily cup of coffee may be doing more for you than providing that early-morning pick-me-up. The health impact of coffee has long been a controversial topic, with advocates touting its antioxidant activity and brain-boosting ability, and detractors detailing downsides such as insomnia,...

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection. You. Yourself. Your very own self.   This was an (admittedly illegal) form of protest against the inescapability of in-your-face marketing in the city I live in. And now that the internet is part of...

What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.   A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty...

“Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards.” —Danny O’Brien Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world...

Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. New, old, and dead writers offer their advice for stepping up your literary game.   These parallel aspirations are a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your...

In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky...

The number 13 is synonymous with bad luck. It’s considered unlucky to have 13 guests at a dinner party, many buildings don’t have a 13th floor and most people avoid getting married or buying a house on a day marked by this dreaded number. Especially superstitious folks even avoid...

When this year’s Miss USA contestants responded to a question about the value of teaching evolution in public schools, one thing was clear: There is a raging debate between Religion and Evolution, and these women had firmly planted themselves on the Bible’s side. However, the snag in this...

In her shortlisted entry for the 2011 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, Crystal Bennes looks at the malleable nature of our brain’s pleasure centres, focusing on pornography. If you want to experience the power of neuroplastic change, I suggest you develop a porn habit. Though still a...

I’ve this piece on the Guardian’s Cif Belief asking about compassion, and tying in with The School of Life’s compassion sermon tomorrow… Compassion is like happiness. Obviously a great good. And yet, I think it is also like happiness in another way. Its realisation is...

You know, all those people comprising your in-real-life social circle, which today seems more and more tied up (see: submersed) in your digital social network. And I’m not talking about your friends simply being a bunch of weirdos, though that may very well be true. I’m talking more about...

How to Stop Caring About Trolls and Get On With Your Life   You see them everywhere you go on the internet: anonymous users with nothing to say but rude, off-topic, or annoying comments aimed at making you angry. The only cure is to just stop caring, and while that’s easier said...

Hooked on the funnies: Does laughter prime humans for companionship? Laughter is like dope: addictive and inebriating. People use laughs as social lubricant, the way we drink alcohol to ease tension and loosen up. But this laughter high may be more than a metaphor, a study from Oxford...

Why We’re Wrong About Being Right The current state of the Internet (did you know that every second something is purchased on eBay from a mobile device?) as well as what comes next. But no matter what the future of tech yields, it’s not what we’re doing right that will lead...

‘Belief’ means something different to scientists and the faithful … we’re open to the idea Einstein may have been wrong Most physicists believe, as Albert Einstein proposed, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You might say that some, like...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Tufts University, Stanford University and the University of California, Irvine has found that the perception of race can be altered by cues to social status as simple as the clothes a person wears. Far from being a straightforward “read...

Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults.   Although you know your teenager takes some chances, it can be a shock to hear about them. Through the ages, most...

A new methodology to study world events   The study of the future, as a scientific and intellectual endeavor, used to be driven by the careful extrapolation of trends, as in Herman Kahn’s Year 2000, or the forecasting of complex interaction among many variables, as in the Club of...

City dwellers may handle pressure differently from those who live in less populated areas Urban life can be trying—cars and buses honk, passersby jostle, concrete and brick win out over grass and trees. Researchers have known for decades that residents of densely populated areas have higher...

Female Orgasm Remains an Evolutionary Mystery ‘The evolutionary basis of human female orgasm has been subject to furious scientific debate.’ After baffling biologists for decades, the female orgasm has resisted yet another attempt to explain its elusive evolutionary origins. A survey of...

When Slate magazine recently dropped “FWIW” in the middle of an article, as if those four letters were just another common word we should all know, I felt at once the need for immediate dictionary assistance. Obviously, FWIW was an acronym of the kind that’s created online, as much for...

British academic Stephen Law is intent on warning people about the perils of bullshit.   First, a credulity test. Do you believe the Bible foretold the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Or that 9/11 was a Jewish conspiracy? Or that, despite the fossil record, the world is less than...

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will...