For those who dont know who Linus Pauling is he won the 1954 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. I dont count his 1962 Nobel Peace Prize since this is just a popularity contest. The only person to have won two true Nobel Prizes is Marie Curie. He got an F in Gymnasium in the second semester…
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Recently I have had occasion to be using LinkedIn because people for some reason instead of emailing me send me messages instead. I find LinkedIn to be fascinating. If Facebook is your slightly brain dead unemployed bogan cousin then LinkedIn is your archetypal idiot private school boy whose parents always bailed him out of trouble,…
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This was originally going to be two separate pieces but part way through they seemed to become more and more related.They became more related because of the intertwined nature of fear and adaptation. Fear is often a failure to adapt to a given circumstance and often adaptation is forced upon through fear. What began me…
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Trying really hard works—and then it gets in your way Peak performance happens as a result of trying really hard, and then not trying at all. It’s a paradox. I’ve never met someone who has described a breakthrough performance as effortful or straining or tight. It’s the opposite: when people are at their best—whether it’s on…
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It’s said we judge the people around us within the first seven seconds of meeting them. I think something similar happens online. I don’t know what the scientific word is for this, but one image, video, or headline from a Twitter account can push us from 0 to 100 (real quick). This is not a…
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In 2011, my parents gave me a sum of money that was both outrageous and, in the real estate terms of major cities, quite reasonable: 10 percent down on the 250-square-foot apartment I still own in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. While I was conflicted about taking it, there wasn’t much of a question about whether I’d…
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You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability? To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our levels of higher education or intelligence (both factors that delay the onset of symptoms of…
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In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.” This became…
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