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Why Speaking To Yourself In The Third Person Makes You Wiser

Why Speaking To Yourself In The Third Person Makes You Wiser

Explainers Life Psychology

Scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as ‘illeism’ – or speaking about yourself in the third person — the term was coined in 1809 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning ‘he, that’.

The Tech Giants Are Coming For Our Homes

The Tech Giants Are Coming For Our Homes

Tech Videos

The likes of Amazon, Google, Samsung, Apple and others are all competing for smart home dominance – but what drove so many of us to invite these multinational corporations into the highly personal spaces where we live?

'The Intelligence Coup Of The Century'

'The Intelligence Coup Of The Century'

Crime History Long Reads

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company, Crypto AG, to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA.

How To Optimize Your Life

How To Optimize Your Life

Explainers Life Videos

You’ve only got — on average — 78.53 years on this planet, total. And you’re likely already spending a precious 5 hours each day on email, not to mention the time spent waiting in line or stuck in transit. But what if there were ways to make more time out of time?

Photographer Toby Coulson Stirs Up Intrigue In The Ordinary

Photographer Toby Coulson Stirs Up Intrigue In The Ordinary

Photos

With a portfolio spanning multiple photographic genres, it seems like no subject is too daunting for Toby Coulson to document. It’s probably his insatiable interest in the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary that makes the London-based photographer’s work so charming.

Why Government Websites Fail

Why Government Websites Fail

Tech

While the rest of the world has evolved to a place where we can track anything at all times and order anything from anywhere, government has been hopelessly stranded on an island in 1993.

No, You Don’t Really Look Like That

No, You Don’t Really Look Like That

Explainers Tech

Every digital camera uses algorithms to transform the different wavelengths of light that hit its sensor into an actual image. What makes the iPhone XS’s skin-smoothing remarkable is that it is simply the default for the camera. Snap a selfie, and that’s what you get.

Virginia Mori

Inspiration
Virginia Mori
The Traffic Merchant

The Traffic Merchant

Apps Media

Google Chrome extensions promised useful tasks like converting webpages into PDFs. But once installed, they injected ads and generated massive amounts of invalid traffic, the ad industry’s term for fake or manipulated views, users, or clicks. More than 60 of those extensions were owned by Daniel Yomtobian.

Hangover Inc.: The Companies Getting You Over Last Night

Hangover Inc.: The Companies Getting You Over Last Night

Business Health

Once a hush-hush luxury for the quietly-pampered, banana bags outside the hospital are hitting the mainstream. Nurses stand ready to provide intravenous care to the dehydrated, alcoholically and otherwise, in their homes and hotel rooms, at walk-in centers and on a hangover bus for special events.

The Citarum: The World’s Most Polluted River

The Citarum: The World’s Most Polluted River

Nature Videos World

The Citarum River in Indonesia is the world’s most polluted river. One of the main polluters is the fashion industry: 500 textile factories throw their wastewater directly into the river. The filmmakers teamed up with international scientists to investigate the causes and consequences of this pollution.

Gennaro Panzuto: The Lancashire Hideaway Of An Italian Mafia Boss

Gennaro Panzuto: The Lancashire Hideaway Of An Italian Mafia Boss

Crime

People liked the gregarious charismatic Italian guy trying to grow pots of basil in the wind-swept chill of rural Lancashire. And Gennaro liked the caravan park because it was a good place to live quietly. It was a good place to hide from the truth written in blood on the streets of Naples.

The Prison Inside Prison

The Prison Inside Prison

Crime Long Reads

Texas has banished hundreds of prisoners to more than a decade of solitary confinement, an extreme form of a controversial punishment likened to torture. Many of these prisoners aren’t sure how—or, in some cases, if—they will ever get out.

Spanish Flu: A Warning From History

Spanish Flu: A Warning From History

Health History Videos

Celebrations marking the end of the First World War were cut short by the onslaught of a devastating disease – the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. The University of Cambridge has made a new film exploring what we have learnt about Spanish Flu, the urgent threat posed by influenza today, and how scientists are preparing for future pandemics.

The Daring Journey Inside The World's Deepest Cave

The Daring Journey Inside The World's Deepest Cave

Nature Videos

The Veryovkina Cave is the deepest known cave on Earth. It took half a century and about 30 expeditions for Russian cave explorers to reach its record depth of 2,212 meters. Speleologists still think there is more to be discovered.

When A Performance Expert Battles Mental Illness

When A Performance Expert Battles Mental Illness

Health Life

Brad Stulberg literally wrote a book on peak performance, but he had to reconsider everything after an unexpected battle with mental illness: “I felt detached from my body, as if I was in a virtual-reality video game. Soon I was completely paralyzed by the sense that I was losing my mind.”

Matt Rota

Inspiration
Matt Rota
Why Caviar Is So Expensive

Why Caviar Is So Expensive

Explainers Food Videos

Caviar is one of the most expensive foods in the world. Selling for up to $35,000 per kilo, it’s revered and relished by aristocrats across the globe. But it’s an acquired taste. Turns out, caviar wasn’t always so valuable.

Banksy's Birmingham Reindeer Are An Artistic Miracle

Banksy's Birmingham Reindeer Are An Artistic Miracle

Art

Banksy’s team of reindeer painted on a wall in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter, pulling a bench that homeless people use as a bed, is rightly popular. Rather than exploit ‘the homeless’, this painting empowers rough sleepers to draw attention to their individuality.

How Eliud Kipchoge Broke Running’s Mythic Barrier

How Eliud Kipchoge Broke Running’s Mythic Barrier

Long Reads

It was one of sport’s great question marks: Is it humanly possible to run 26.2 miles in under two hours? Then Eliud Kipchoge did it. What followed was international fame—and plenty of controversy. GQ flew to Kipchoge’s ultra-rarefied Kenyan training ground to meet the man who pulled off the impossible.

Guatemala Is The Land Of Unknown Ancient Food Traditions

Guatemala Is The Land Of Unknown Ancient Food Traditions

Food

Guatemala remains one of the Western Hemisphere’s last true culinary terrae incognitae. Due to centuries of isolation in the volcano-strewn highlands, many members of the 23 distinct Maya groups in rural Guatemala still wear the same outfits that their great-great-great-great-grandparents did.

AR For The Naked Eye Transforms Outdoor Advertising

AR For The Naked Eye Transforms Outdoor Advertising

Innovation Media

London-based media technology startup Lightvert has created a new method for using unexpected and unusual locations. Lightvert’s ECHO technology projects images into the air. Moreover, the images are particular to that location and cannot be seen even a few feet away from the optimal viewing position.

The Fall Of New York And The Urban Crisis Of Affluence

The Fall Of New York And The Urban Crisis Of Affluence

Cities Long Reads

I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.

The Drone Boat Of ‘Shipwreck Alley’

The Drone Boat Of ‘Shipwreck Alley’

Nature Tech

Divers flock from all over the world to see the wrecks for themselves each year — and last spring, they were joined by an unusual interloper: an autonomous boat named BEN. BEN is a self-driving boat that’s been tasked with making maps, and to help lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed.

Joseph Ford

Inspiration
Joseph Ford
Radical Hydrogen-Boron Reactor Leapfrogs Current Nuclear Fusion Tech

Radical Hydrogen-Boron Reactor Leapfrogs Current Nuclear Fusion Tech

Innovation Science

HB11 Energy is a spin-out company that originated at the University of New South Wales, and it announced today a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. Fusion, of course, is the long-awaited clean, safe theoretical solution to humanity’s energy needs.

Artists Create Incredible Model Sets To Imagine A Bleak Future Without Humans

Artists Create Incredible Model Sets To Imagine A Bleak Future Without Humans

Art Photos

In their haunting upcoming show, The City and Other Stories, US artists Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber imagine what the world might look like when we’re all gone. But these photographs aren’t images of real places; they’re model sets that they’ve built collaboratively at their studios in Brooklyn and Cincinnati.

Can We Survive Extreme Heat?

Can We Survive Extreme Heat?

Long Reads Nature

As the climate warms, heat waves are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Since the 1960s, the average number of annual heat waves in 50 major American cities has tripled. They are also becoming more deadly. Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.

How To Persuade People To Change Their Behavior

How To Persuade People To Change Their Behavior

Explainers Life

Our innate anti-persuasion radar raises our defenses, so we avoid or ignore the message or, even worse, counter-argue. Rather than trying to persuade people, getting them to persuade themselves is often more effective. Here are three ways to do that.

Abandoned Places: The Pontiac Silverdome

Abandoned Places: The Pontiac Silverdome

History Videos

Just outside of Detroit, in Pontiac Michigan, sits one of the most famous and iconic abandoned structures in the country. At one time the largest NFL stadium and host to SuperBowl 16. This is the Pontiac Silverdome.

Murder And Manifest Destiny On The Mosquito Coast

Murder And Manifest Destiny On The Mosquito Coast

Long Reads World

In 1999, a mysterious Greek entrepreneur bought and resold a series of tiny islands off the coast of Nicaragua, setting off a bizarre and tragic chain of events that included a reality-TV sensation and allegations of an insidious murder plot. The ensuing chaos brought to light a centuries-old question: Who does land really belong to?

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