As I write about in the philosophy of Westworld , life is really about meaning loops. They’re the structures that make us want to strive and improve, and that make life matter. Everybody has them. For

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, so I’ll just put it here in hope it reaches someone who does. Your value to most people in the greater uninterested world comes from your output. Not your ideas. N

It’s so simple that it can be easy to overlook: In the commotion of daily life, people forget to thank their partner for the myriad things they do. During the pandemic, significant others have made ev

How to Build Resilience in Midlife Credit... Sarah Williamson Much of the scientific research on resilience — our ability to bounce back from adversity — has focused on how to build resilience in chil

Guest Essay We’re Living Through the ‘Boring Apocalypse’ Dec. 10, 2021 Credit... Félix Decombat By Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton, the author of “Think Again: The Power of Know

What Will the World Be Like in 20 Years? Looking at demographic data can help us assess the opportunities and challenges of the coming decades. Credit... Mirko Ilic By Published Nov. 27, 2021 Updated

Peter Boghossian was assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University until he felt forced to resign last week. His resignation letter went viral – it was a righteous blast against the g

Guest Essay I Will Never Forget That I Could Have Lived With People Who Loved Me Sept. 16, 2021 Credit... Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times By Mr. Cancel is the founder of an organization dedicate

How to Let Your Mind Wander Research suggests that people with freely moving thoughts are happier. Easy, repetitive activities like walking can help get you in the right mindset. Credit... Illustratio

Mindfulness may have many benefits – but the latest research shows it can also make some people more selfish. Mindfulness is said to do many things for our psyche : it can increase our self-control, s

Wealth is easy to measure but hard to value. When George Vanderbilt moved into Biltmore – the largest home in America at 178,000 square feet – one newspaper in 1899 wondered what the point was. The go

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appe

A class at Gen.G Elite Esports Academy in Seoul. Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times Inside the ‘Deadly Serious’ World of E-Sports in South Korea Each year, thousands of young South Koreans comp

Penises are shrinking and genitals becoming malformed because of pollution, an environmental scientist has warned in a new book detailing the challenges facing human reproduction. Dr Shanna Swan write

A few weeks ago, I met my first Millennial grandparent. I was interviewing a woman in her late 30s about President Joe Biden’s new child-tax-credit proposal, and she mentioned that it would benefit no

On Monday morning, my partner laid a carry-on suitcase down on the floor, preparing to pack for his first post-vaccination trip to visit his parents. The moment he unzipped the bag, our cat Calvin pro

The Death of the Middle The emergence of department stores opened up a vast array of choices for the everyday consumer. No longer did they have to go to the corner store and hope their store clerk was

” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. T he other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden . It turned out

No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. If you can think through things better than others, you’ll have fewer problems and more free time

Why Spy Agencies Say the Future Is Bleak Climate change, technology, disease and financial crises will pose big challenges for the world, an intelligence report concludes. April 15, 2021 By The editor

Image credit: Colin, Wikimedia CC BY SA 2.0/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ March 25, 2021 It’s 2 p.m. on a Sunday, several months into a war that I’ve been fighting in as a remotely pilo

Alan Lightman , the physicist who brought us The Accidental Universe , has also written several works of fiction, including Einstein’s Dreams , presented as dreams Einstein might have had while workin

If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. Money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time. Un

The biggest change in my professional maturity came when I became Actually Responsible for things. Not in the sense of “if there’s a mix of dashes and em-dashes in this powerpoint deck someone will ge

Books are a uniquely portable magic. Stephen King Stephen King The more I read the more I find it difficult to talk to people who don’t. I am aware of how bad that sounds, but it’s not what you’re thi

A new book makes the case that sperm counts have been falling for decades — and a major reason is chemicals in the environment that disrupt the body's hormonal system. Why it matters: The ability to r

Strange things are happening at the outer edges of our solar system. An object up to ten times the mass of Earth is pulling others towards it. Is it a planet, or something else? As we head towards the

Our obsession with being informed makes it hard to think long-term. We spend hours consuming news because we want to be informed. The problem is, the news doesn’t make us informed – quite the opposite

In November, as fall was fading, Matt Binnicker began to hunker down for a hard winter. The coronavirus had already infected an estimated 13 million people nationwide , and his team at the Mayo Clinic

On the Clock On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work. See More → On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse

1. “An Evolving Situation” There are three moments in the yearlong catastrophe of the COVID -19 pandemic when events might have turned out differently. The first occurred on January 3, 2020, when Robe

Memory is an intrinsic part of our life experience. It is critical for learning, and without memories we would have no sense of self. Understanding why some memories stick better than others, as well

Go Ahead. Fantasize. Imagining a better future, whether it includes gigantic house parties or just more hugs, helps humans cope with difficult times. Oh, to breathe the same air! Credit... Daniel Arno

” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Several years ago, I was sitting on a flight to San Francisco, when my seatmate, a man a little older than me, str

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. P eter Turchin , on

2020 Taught Us How to Fix This Our current model of social change isn’t working. Dec. 31, 2020 By Opinion Columnist This is the year that broke the truth. This is the year when millions of Americans —

There are many people who strongly believe that aliens are real and they are living somewhere far from the blue planet, Earth. But a new scientific study suggested that such civilizations destroyed th

Credit: National Research Council of Science & Technology The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to live the ideal life. This was prompted years ago by David Brooks who talked about résumé virtues vs. eulogy virtues in The Road to Character : It