One of the seminal books on culture is Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership . Schein writes in the introduction: Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of culture as a concept is that it points us to phenomena that are below the surface, that are powerful in their impact but invisible…

“ The revolution will not take place in a classroom. ” by Carol Black “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” Thoreau says it in “Walking,” and Jack Turner, in his exquisite collection of essays, questions how many of us have any idea what it means. People often misread the quote, Turner…

Emily Pidgeon You don’t “find your calling,” you fight for it — and other lessons from people who found their passion (sometimes late in life). Whether it was during a career aptitude test or in a heart-to-heart chat after getting laid off, chances are someone has talked to you about how to “find…

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes. “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” — Unknown. I’m an expert on how technology hijacks our psychological vulnerabilities. That’s why I spent the last three years as a Design Ethicist at Google caring about how to design…

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s…

Everyone knows exercise plays an important role in our general health, but whether its a lack of motivation, the need to travel to the gym, the cost of equipment, or simply know-how, these supposed obstacles often stand in our way. In reality, all you need is yourself. Here’s how you can get a…

By Kevin Poulsen Typography by Michiel Schuurman One Thursday in January 2001, Maksym Igor Popov, a 20-year-old Ukrainian man, walked nervously through the doors of the United States embassy in London. While Popov could have been mistaken for an exchange student applying for a visa, in truth he was…

Sending emails requires too much clicking and typing. Yes, it takes just fewminutes every week, but inefficiency makes me feel miserable, and thisfeeling lasts longer. After all, I love writing, I just do not like dullclicking. Humans hate boring mechanical work, and robots adore it. Right? Atleast…

In his book, Ego is the Enemy , Ryan Holiday tells the story of Genghis Khan and how his openness to learning was the foundation of his success. By Ryan Holiday The legend of Genghis Khan has echoed through history: A barbarian conqueror, fueled by bloodlust, terrorizing the civilized world. We have…

O ne icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country…

A lex Honnold has his own verb. “To honnold”—usually written as “honnolding”—is to stand in some high, precarious place with your back to the wall, looking straight into the abyss. To face fear, literally. The verb was inspired by photographs of Honnold in precisely that position on Thank God Ledge,…

Fifty years ago, if your television broke you could bring it to the local electronics shop to be repaired. These days, a broken TV likely means a trip to Best Buy for a new one. Electronics have become harder to fix. This is, in part, because they’ve become more complex. But some of the problem is…

In a storage room on the top floor of one of the Smithsonian's fortresslike buildings, a legendary athlete is playing with artificial hearts. Forty-eight-year-old Rodney “Mutt” Mullen, who revolutionized skateboarding as a teen, first twists apart the plastic ventricles of a Jarvik-7 that once beat…

On the first day of the sprawling RSA security industry conference in San Francisco, a giant screen covering the wall of the Moscone Center’s cavernous lobby cycles through the names and headshots of keynote speakers: steely-eyed National Security Agency director Michael Rogers in a crisp military…

Step right up! Amazon’s Alexa is a stupendous novelty act that can play thousands of songs, guess your weight, and conjure a pizza from thin air! Illustration by Benze In the entryway to Hollywood’s Magic Castle, if you speak a secret password into a small sculpture of an owl, a bookcase will…

Recent scientific revelations raise big questions about what trading, sharing, or even friendship might mean among plants. Illustration by Enzo Pérès-Labourdette Epping Forest is a heavily regulated place. First designated as a royal hunting ground by Henry II in the twelfth century, with severe…

I n the past year, despite hundreds of people asking me, I’m proud to say that I’ve managed to avoid all temptation to write an article about Donald Trump or the slow motion, 20-car pileup that is this year’s US presidential election. Until now. Before, I stayed out of the gravitational pull of…

This is Jack: And this is Today: Jack and Today are dating. The relationship is going all right and Jack’s reasonably happy, but for a while now, Jack has known that the Today he’s with is not the one . Sure, he and Today have fun sometimes, but all too often, Jack feels like he’s dating a mundane…

Recent research found 70% of people in middle- and high-income countries believe overconsumption is putting our planet and society at risk.Photograph: Seth Wenig/Reuters T his week, heads of state are gathering in New York to sign the UN’s new sustainable development goals (SDGs). The main objective…

We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. Part 1: Meet Your Mammoth The first day I was in second grade, I came to school and noticed that there was a new, very pretty girl in the class—someone who hadn’t been there the previous two years. Her name was Alana and…

Phase 3: Colonize Mars Main Character: The Mars Colonial Transporter Goal: Put 1,000,000 people on Mars Today, no one is talking about Mars, and very few people think of Mars as a relevant part of the near future. But unless I’ve missed something big or something unexpected happens, in about 10–20…

Phase 2: Revolutionize the cost of space travel Main Characters: Falcon 9, Dragon, Falcon Heavy Goal: Get the price for a trip to Mars down to $500,000/seat Today, many people have heard of SpaceX. Few know what SpaceX does. And even fewer know what SpaceX really does. Here’s what SpaceX does: It…

Part 3: How to Colonize Mars There are some tough “going from A to B” situations in life. Going from A) I can’t believe my alarm just went off to B) Now I’m sitting at work. From A) My lease ends next month to B) Now I’m totally moved into a new apartment and all the things are even hung on the…

Part 2: Musk’s Mission Like the rest of us, Elon Musk has a handful of life goals. Unlike the rest of us, one of those life goals is to put 1,000,000 people on Mars. In the last few months, as I’ve explained to friends what I’m doing with this post series, there’s always that distinct moment when I…

This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal. But like the Tesla post , I…

This is Part 1 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. __________ PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here ), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series: ___________ Last month, I got a surprising phone…

Husband-and-wife photography team Erlend and Orsolya Haarberg are perfectly comfortable with silence. So comfortable, in fact that they would go weeks at a time without seeing another human being while hiking, camping, and photographing in the magical and mystical landscape of Swedish Laponia. And…

Immerse Yourself in the Rugged Beauty of Ireland's West Coast The Wild Atlantic Way, on the west coast of the Republic of Ireland , is like stepping into another world. Both rugged and bucolic, the Wild Atlantic Way boasts rocky coastlines, green hillsides, land and sea adventures, and enough local…

Calligrapher and type designer Sebastian “Seb” Lester is one of my favourite people to follow on Instagram ( @seblester ). The hand drawn calligraphy videos that he creates are so satisfying to watch that I find myself returning to them time and time again. It’s no wonder he’s amassed a following of…

Elizabeth Gilbert shares 11 ways to think smartly about creativity. Creativity is a tricky word. Consultants peddle it, brands promise it, we all strive for it, often without really knowing quite what “it” really is. Put simply, there’s a lot of snake oil around creativity. But now here’s author…

Noël Alva Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don’t finish school , get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you…

Four years ago, on a whim, Joe Doucet decided to 3D-print a steel fork. A designer and entrepreneur, Doucet was regularly sending designs to 3D printing companies so they could test his prototypes. Once, in the technology’s early days, he even 3D-printed a piece of furniture out of resin for an…

In April of 1958, Hunter S. Thompson was 22 years old when he wrote a letter on the meaning and purpose of life when asked by his friend, Hume Logan, for advice. In just a few paragraphs, Thompson’s letter offers deeply thoughtful ideas, and what makes it all the more profound is the fact that at…

Illustration by Alan Vest T o mark the imminent end of summer, my boys and I recently went on a journey down the Erie Canal. Before being handed the key to our 12-ton narrowboat, the Oneida, we were given a shockingly brief and casual orientation. Much that was assumed obvious – “Obviously you tie…

Much like “the cloud,” “big data,” and “machine learning” before it, the term “artificial intelligence” has been hijacked by marketers and advertising copywriters. Photograph by Erich Hartmann / Magnum Earlier this month, on his HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver skewered media companies’…

In 2012, Dan Buettner set off around the world to answer a question that has obsessed philosophers and doctors since Methuselah: Why do people in some parts of the world live so much longer than others? His travels took him to Greece, Nicaragua and Japan, among others. Then he brought the lessons…

When you see something that seems like an impossible challenge, do you feel that itch developing in your mind? This post originally appeared on Crew. Get more like it by signing up for our weekly newsletter . B ack in the 1960s, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth made a famous short film called The…