Switzerland’s ‘Secret’ Fifth Language
Head to medieval Basse-Ville, caught between the German- and French-speaking divisions of Fribourg, and you’ll find yourself in a no-man’s land where the two languages have become one: le Bolze.
How Cities Became Childless
American cities are getting more expensive, and families are being pushed out. Welcome to the future of urban living, where young people have to make a choice: money or babies?
This Tank Graveyard Is A Monument To Eritrea’s Struggle For Liberation
A short distance from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, lies a “tank graveyard”—a field littered with thousands of stacked military tanks, rusting trucks, and worn-out cars, remnants of a devastating, three-decade conflict with Ethiopia. A massive military junkyard takes on new meaning.
How To Be Productive According To Ancient Philosophy
Productivity has been a topic of discussion ever since ancient eastern and western philosophy started. It’s a universal theme. I believe it’s in our nature to make better use of our time. Let’s start by learning the following 7 productivity lessons from the most well-known philosophers in history.
How You Can Survive — And Thrive In — Midlife
After two years of research and more than 400 interviews about midlife, former NPR reporter Barb Bradley Hagerty received dozens of insights about how to live well in the middle years. We’ve distilled them here, with a little context.
Silicon Valley Is Listening To Your Most Intimate Moments
For $12 an hour, “data associates” listened to snippets of random conversations and jotted down every word on their laptops. Amazon would only say the work was critical to a top-secret speech-recognition product. The clips included recordings of intimate moments inside people’s homes.
The Lost Art Of Concentration: Being Distracted In A Digital World
We check our phones every 12 minutes, often just after waking up. Always-on behaviour is harmful to long-term mental health, and we need to learn to the hit the pause button. Experts are telling us that these interruptions and distractions have eroded our ability to concentrate.
How Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture
More and more offices are adopting the work culture invented by the technology upstarts. These are not the offices where your grandparents worked, clocking out at 5 sharp, eyeballing the corner office. There is no corner office here—just “hot desks” and open floor plans, wide as the prairie.
Why We Need To Stop Striving For Work-Life Balance
When you separate work and life, it’s a little bit harder to make that connection. But when you think of work as part of a full life and a holistic experience, it becomes easier to see that success in one aspect often supports another.
The Brazilian Town Where The American Confederacy Lives On
Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. The Confederados in Americana, Brazil, are one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.
World’s Busiest Station: Shinjuku Station, Tokyo
Five separate train lines, almost three thousand passengers per minute and trains arriving every second. How can the people behind the scenes of the world’s busiest station overcome a traffic load like this every day? A look behind the scenes of the world’s busiest station: Shinjuku Station in Tokyo.
The Sound Of Icebergs Melting: My Journey Into The Antarctic
We were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.
What It’s Like To Grow Up In An Israeli Settlement
A self-described liberal from cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, Iris Zaki wanted to get behind the politics of Israel’s controversial settlements in the occupied territories — so she moved there, temporarily, setting up an improvised cafe where she could chat with settlers from her own generation.
Deep In The Ocean’s Trenches, The Legacy Of Nuclear Testing Lives
Evidence of Cold War nuclear testing has made its way to the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean. The discovery of “bomb carbon” miles below the surface shows how deep human impact goes.
Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus
In keeping with recent research, both focus and unfocus are vital. The brain operates optimally when it toggles between focus and unfocus, allowing you to develop resilience, enhance creativity, and make better decisions too.
Thirty-Six Thousand Feet Under The Sea
For more than a year, the team trying to reach the deepest point in every ocean faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they invented. This is the story of the explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.
Tokyo In The 1970s, A Pre-Blade Runner City, Amazing Unseen Photos By Greg Girard
To mark the release of his latest book, ‘Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983’, Greg Girard has shared a collection of largely unseen images offering a nostalgic glimpse of the Japanese capital before it exploded into the hyper-modern metropolis we know today.
The Music In You
The more psychologists investigate musicality, the more it seems that nearly all of us are musical experts, in quite a startling sense. You might not be a virtuoso, but you have remarkable music abilities. You just don’t know about them yet.
In Venezuela’s Economic Crisis, Bitcoin Is a Lifeline
Faced with hyperinflation, a worthless local currency and a risky black market for dollars, Venezuelans are increasingly turning to bitcoin as a tool for survival in the world’s worst-performing economy.
Why Elon Musk And Jack Dorsey Have Big Plans For Africa
Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and Square, Inc, raised some eyebrows in Silicon Valley when he announced he was moving to Africa in 2020. Africa is poised to take off as the next big tech market, and both America and China have taken notice.
Revisiting An American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark
Anna is a city of a little more than 4,000 people located in the middle of Union County, where soybean fields and flatlands to the north give way to the forests and sandstone canyons of southern Illinois. Most people I met, wish the racist lore behind the city’s name would go away. So why hasn’t it?