Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber…

Chapter 3: relationships: Romanticism Romanticism Anyone we might marry could, of course, be a little bit wrong for us. We don’t expect bliss every day. We know that perfection is not on the cards. Nevertheless, there are couples who display such deep-seated incompatibility, such heightened rage and…

If econometric studies were all there were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best—controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think…

(Photo: Pixabay) I once worked for an incredibly dysfunctional company filled with people who had no business doing the jobs they had been hired to do. The head of this company, forced to deal with the endless and frustrating mistakes made by his incompetent employees, did not respond with…

Dear Dan— I’d like to thank you for taking the time to review Free Will at such length. Publicly engaging me on this topic is certainly preferable to grumbling in private. Your writing is admirably clear, as always, which worries me in this case, because we appear to disagree about a great many…

Photographs by Anna Maria Barry-Jester A s the new year begins, millions of people are vowing to shape up their eating habits. This usually involves dividing foods into moralistic categories: good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, nutritious/indulgent, slimming/fattening — but which foods belong where depends…

What is the Islamic State ? Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special…

A spectator at Meydan racecourse in Dubai.Photograph: Frank Sorge/racingfotos.com/Rex A party of school-age swimmers takes to the waters of a municipal pool in north London. Among her peers, one Muslim girl stands out – nine or 10 years of age, brown face and eyes under a yellow cap, sliding…

Over the years, I’ve employed quite a few people. Sometimes it will be a contract for a one-time job. Other times it will be for regular staff. In both cases, there’s a certain quality some people possess that I’ve found immensely valuable, but rarely shows up on a resume. If I had to describe it, I…

I don’t know what my parents were thinking—somehow, for some reason, they let me watch The Exorcist when I was eight years old. When the movie first came out in 1973, there were stories about audience members fainting, puking, and fleeing the theater, but apparently my parents saw no problem with…

Do millennials really have attention spans shorter than a goldfish? That’s what the media would have you believe, but as always, the truth is a bit more complicated—and a lot less comfortable. In a new original video essay for Fusion, filmmaker Adam Westbrook looks at the history of distraction,…

Professor Nicholas Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students…

About twenty years ago, a group of college students at Stanford University headed home for winter break. While they were gone, they were given the task of keeping a daily journal. In this journal, some of the students were asked to write about their most important personal values and then describe…

Only 40 More Years of Working For That Bling Bling (photo credit – Achim Voss ) For somebody who has committed to building wealth through living well below their means and investing, how long will it take to become financially independent? Often times we use simple rule of thumb calculations to make…

Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble. (Quidvis recte factum quamvis humile praeclarum.) —Sir Henry Royce super awesome Whatever you’re doing right now, chances are you’d probably rather not be doing it . Even if you’ve got your dream job , it’s very likely that right now you could…

“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care about their opinions more than our own.” – Marcus Aurelius LASZLO ILYES A couple weeks ago, I gave a talk at a large event. I missed one of the earlier speakers because I was nervously pacing around backstage,…

Thomas Høyrup Christensen Most of us got into what we do because we one, like it, or two, are good at it. We generally know what we want and need, as well as what we hope to achieve. The irony is, the further you travel down that path of accomplishment, whatever it may be, the more often you meet…

mattpbrock I’ve run nearly everyday since 2005. Before that there was four years of cross country and track, and before that two years of middle school track and field. I didn’t really enjoy it as a kid, and didn’t treat it seriously for a lot of reasons, so I don’t count those years. Just the last…

A couple of years ago, I woke to three birds circling over my body, barking. I’d been sleeping in a bivouac, a kind of raincoat for a sleeping bag, camped in the tundra of Alaska’s Kantishna Hills. I unzipped the bivouac and popped my head out, peering up as the eerie silhouetted birds swooped…

Ryan Tomayko / April 01, 2005 Jon was a Computer Science major at Ohio State University taking acourse in artificial intelligence. The professor had set up aninteresting group project where each student was responsible for writingan insect program that would be matched against all the other…

There is a bunch of data that shows that the more we talk about things, the less we tend to actually accomplish them. This is because—and I’m sure you can think of a person in your life who does this a lot—the act of articulating the goal entails visualizing the achievement of it, and thus partially…

suez92 If you read a lot or are someone who gets a lot done, people will assume two things. One, that you’re a speed reader . Two, that you never sleep. In my experience, neither of those assumptions are true. Or at least, they don’t need to be. There’s no trick to reading a lot . But more…

The idea of being a parent should be thought through more carefully. When we assess the idea, it is clear that, given the current conditions of the world, there is no reason to create more children. I proposed this argument in 2010 and received vitriolic replies, which brought more heat than light…

View this email in your browser The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Investing All Of Your Money by James Altucher In the history of capitalism, this is the hardest time ever to invest. People are going broke, losing their jobs, and fear more than greed rules the news and tries to rule thoughts. In short:…

My mom tells me, "When you were a kid, you were so laid back and happy that we were worried you might be retarded." In my tween years, I grew fiercely competitive. I always wanted to win and lead things. Any type of game I played in, I wanted to win. Every conversation, I wanted to be the smartest…

When he retired from the printing business at the age of 42, Benjamin Franklin set his sights on becoming what he called a “Man of Leisure.” To modern ears, that title might suggest Franklin aimed to spend his autumn years sleeping in or stopping by the tavern, but to colonial contemporaries, it…

By Sugar July 15th, 2010 Dear Sugar, About eighteen months ago, I got pregnant. In a move that surprised both my boyfriend and me, we decided we wanted to keep the baby. Though the pregnancy was unplanned, we were really excited to become parents and the child was very much loved and wanted. When I…

S omething strange is happening at America’s colleges and universities. A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense. Last December, Jeannie Suk wrote in an online article for The…

Being a person is not the essence of humanity, only... one of its many masks. — John Gray Pardon me while I scratch a little itch here in public. I'd like to describe for you a concept that I can see very clearly in my mind. I can't entirely justify its existence or its utility, but it's given me…

Last week CTV News did a segment with a Canadian doctor named Mike Evans, who started a Twitter campaign to encourage people to take the stairs, park farther away, sit less, and walk more. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this advice. Telling people to “be more active” is about as new to us as…

Picsfive / Piotr Marcinski / Shutterstock / Zak Bickel / The Atlantic Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance.…

HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equalbefore God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarterthan anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody wasstronger or quicker than anybody…

The Myth of the Ethical Shopper Michael Hobbes There’s this video that went viral earlier this year. On Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, a vending machine is selling plain white T-shirts for €2 each. Customers approach in ones and twos, insert coins, pick a size. Then, before the shirt comes out, a photo…

The phrase “Don’t get emotional” implies that we normally aren’t. Most of our news headlines can be interpreted as emotional responses gone overboard, becoming crime, scandal, corruption, greed, and bad policy. The fact that these reactions are newsworthy seems to reinforce the idea that emotions…

Disclaimers: 1) This is a very long read. Thinking about a company and using its product obsessively for nine years straight will do that to you. 2) My funds and I own a lot of Twitter stock. 3) I do not speak for Twitter. 4) I have no inside information about Twitter. The company could already be…

[Originally published September 20, 2013.] - - - Well, Sarge, we’ve been poring over this case day and night trying to make some sense of it. After the evidence we fished out of the reservoir and the latest reports from the boys in the lab, we finally have a profile coming together: our killer…

The Talented Mr. Khater When 23-year-old Callie Quinn moved from Texas to Chile, she counted on finding a beautiful country, meaningful work, and interesting friends. She had no idea she’d set off a manhunt for an international con artist. Youssef Khater competing in Brazil’s Jungle Marathon in…

Today's Terraform dispatch is a special event: We've teamed up with the think/do tank Data & Society to help them unleash their "Intelligence & Autonomy" project. It's a pursuit perfectly suited to Terraform; Data & Society has tapped some top authors to use speculative fiction to investigate and…

Noah Berger / Reuters Graduation season is almost done, and it has brought the usual spate of commencement speeches that urge graduates to follow their passion, be true to themselves, inspire their fellow humans, and save the world. But in recent years there has been a dissenting note to this…

I just finished the strangest, most disconcerting little book. It's called Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania. If the title hasn't already piqued your interest, its thesis surely will. The thesis is wild, bold, and original, but makes an eerie amount of sense. If true,…