Ideas

Written by Jean M. Twenge One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do … Read More

TOLSTOI HOLDS LINCOLN WORLD’S GREATEST HERO. Bigger Than His Country. Bigger Than All the Presidents Together: a Christ in Miniature. STILL TOO NEAR TO APPRECIATE HIS POWER. Great Russian Tells of Reverence For Lincoln Even Among Barbarians. Of all the great national heroes and statesman of history, Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Fredric the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone … Read More

Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built on trust, norms, and institutions inherently function better than the type of no-need-for-trusted-parties systems blockchain envisions. That’s permanent: no matter how much blockchain improves it is still headed in the wrong … Read More

For decades my carpenter father, who died in 2009, always carried a small wood level in his pocket. He would fish it out and place it on the nearest horizontal surface: shelves, mantels, stairs—even sidewalks. At the neighbor’s, when he thought no one was looking, he would sneak it out and go to work. Is … Read More

Bob Hall was a rancher. In 1936, in the midst of the Depression, he was suffering from a cancer that was eating the flesh on the side of his face. His ranch had dwindled to nearly nothing, and weeks after bankers took the last of his livestock, Hall died, leaving his family deeply in debt. … Read More

By Morten T. Hansen Most Americans work impossibly hard. We put in long hours and maximum effort, but better performance often eludes us. I’m no exception. I remember being in my 20s and landing my dream job as a management consultant at the posh London office of the U.S.-based Boston Consulting Group. I strode through the … Read More

By Warren Buffett I have good news. First, most American children are going to live far better than their parents did. Second, large gains in the living standards of Americans will continue for many generations to come. Some years back, people generally agreed with my optimism. Today, however, pollsters find that most Americans are pessimistic about their … Read More

My 19 year old son Zach just finished his first summer internship. Back in May, a few days before he started his internship, I sent him this email…Zach, as you begin your first serious internship, I wanted to share some advice. When I started my first job, I wish someone would have sat me down … Read More

I was scheduled to speak about the world outlook at an investment conference recently and shortly before my time slot the conference organizer said the audience was more interested in what I had learned over the course of my career than what I had to say about the market. I jotted a few notes down … Read More

Written by Stephen Mihm Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. Census Bureau put some coal in the nation’s holiday stocking. It released data highlighting a worrisome trend: The population grew a subdued 0.7 percent, the lowest rate of growth since the Great Depression years of 1936 and 1937. Declines in the birthrate and the slowing pace of … Read More

Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior James Bond StockdaleI came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever out of a cockpit. In 1962, I began my second year of studying international relations … Read More

By Paul Mozur and Jane Perlez March 22, 2017 HONG KONG — When the United States Air Force wanted help making military robots more perceptive, it turned to a Boston-based artificial intelligence start-up called Neurala. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military. So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from … Read More

Forgive me. I’m going to return to a story that has been well documented the past few weeks, and I ask your indulgence. So much has been happening, there are so many things to say, and yet my mind will not leave one thing: the firemen, and what they did. Although their heroism has been widely … Read More

A recent survey asked “All things considered, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or neither getting better nor worse?”. In Sweden 10% thought things are getting better, in the US they were only 6%, and in Germany only 4%. Very few people think that the world is getting better. What is … Read More

Bud Day was perhaps the bravest of the brave at the Hanoi Hilton. After serving as a U.S. Marine in World War II, a normal man might have concluded that he had done more than his share of military service. And anyone still alive after his parachute failed to open upon ejection from an Air Force … Read More