In 1954, psychologist Muzafer Sherif engineered a tribal war between two groups of 11-year-old boys in two camps inside Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. They were given tasks, rewards, and objectives — the kind of thing that would be prime-time reality TV these days. Before long, the two camps had established tribal identities. They had their own culture, norms, and behavioral standards. They were The Eagles and The Rattlers. And, other than a few insults and scowls, the two camps lived in peace. But after five days, Sherif upped the game. He had the two groups compete for food. He limited ..read more

Student loans continue to burden adults decades after they’ve left school, and credit card debt haunts many Americans. On the flip side, many of us make leveraged investments in our homes, taking out mortgages to buy houses that we expect to appreciate in value. In other words, debt structures American lives in myriad ways. But, as historian Louis Hyman writes, this is a relatively new thing. In the nineteenth century, Hyman points out, if an individual needed credit, they turned to friends, loan sharks, or local merchants. For corner grocers and country stores, these loans were money-lo ..read more

I have a group of cycling friends and we all go mountain biking together away about twice a year. I get on well with everyone apart from [one guy], who recently ruined the last trip for me by being antagonistic. He’s an ex-soldier and holds very right-wing views. I’m very liberal. Mike knows this and all through the weekend he kept saying slightly bigoted things about gay and trans folks and about migrants within earshot of me, trying to get me to bite. I didn’t but it did piss me off and marred the whole weekend. Can I politely exclude Mike from future trips because I enjoy the company of e ..read more

Less than a century ago, we had many different ideas for what the history of our Universe looked like, but shockingly little evidence available to decide the issue. Hypotheses included suggestions that our Universe: violated the principle of relativity, and that the light we observed from distant objects simply got tired as it traveled through the Universe, was the same not only in all locations, but at all times: static and unchanging even as our cosmic history unfolded, didn’t obey General Relativity, but rather a modified version of it that included a scalar field, didn’t include ultra-di ..read more

Hunting for life on other planets is hard; it’s like trying to spot an ant on the other end of a football field. The closest potential host, Venus, is 25 million miles away. Beyond our Solar System, exoplanets that have piqued astronomers’ interest are light-years away. To search for life from these sizable distances, scientists look for biosignatures: elements, molecules, or substances that might have been made by life. These include oxygen and methane, among other compounds. But there’s growing doubt that biosignatures will ever constitute concrete evidence of extraterrestrials. After all ..read more

Many summers ago, when I was young, I got some booze, I got drunk, and I got a hangover. The next morning, I told my dad what happened over breakfast. “We had some wine at the restaurant,” I groaned, “and then a few beers at Mark’s house. It doesn’t seem enough for me to feel this bad.” My dad chuckled the chuckle of the knowing. He then said something I carry with me to this day: “Beer before wine and you’ll feel fine; wine before beer and you’ll feel queer.” Years later, I’m fairly certain my dad was dealing in aphoristic pseudoscience, but the point is that out of all the many tidbits of a ..read more

In 2011, software engineer and satirist Manu Cornet posted a cartoon on his blog mocking Microsoft’s culture of cutthroat competition under CEO Steve Ballmer. The cartoon depicted the company’s org chart as a collection of guns, each one pointing at another employee. It became a viral sensation. Enter Satya Nadella. When Nadella became Microsoft’s CEO in 2014, he restructured the company’s culture around the psychological concept of a “growth mindset.” He built it into strategy decisions, resource allocations, and performance evaluations. He even revised the company’s mission statement to inc ..read more

Nothing in this Universe lasts forever, no matter how large, massive, or enduring it appears to be. Every star that’s ever born will someday run out of fuel in its core and die. Every galaxy that’s actively forming stars will someday run out of star-forming material and cease doing so. And every light that shines will someday cool off and go dark. If we wait long enough, there will be nothing to see, observe, or even extract energy from; when it reaches a state of maximal entropy, the cosmos will achieve a “heat death,” the inevitable final-stage in our cosmic evolution. But what, exactly, do ..read more

Bret broke up with his long-term girlfriend. He’s lonely and cries more often than anyone knows. Stuck in a dark place, he picks up the phone and messages Anth. Anth isn’t a close friend, but Bret picked him over his dad, his brother, and his best friend is because Anth went through a brutal divorce last year. He knows what this pain feels like. Ellen has just been told she has breast cancer. The doctor, though young, is friendly and says all the right things, but she still wants to scream in his face. He gives Ellen a leaflet. It has undoubtedly passed eight rounds of medically rigorous edit ..read more

Research has shown that the most important factor in determining how you respond to stress is how you think about your ability to handle it. Don’t miss the significance of this statement. The power to determine your best response to stress is in your control, and it depends on nothing more than how you choose to view your ability to manage it. With a little practice, you can learn to shift from a threat response to a challenge response, even if you’ve lived with an overactive amygdala your whole life. Here’s how it works. The second you face a stressor, your brain automatically begins to eval ..read more