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

I was on a plane, the regular shuttle between Boston and Washington, DC, sitting next to Steve, who had been my mentor since the day I joined BCG (Boston Consulting Group). We were in the bulkhead seats, on the right side of the plane. Yes, I do recall this detail; it was a vivid moment for me.  He and I were on our way to DC to house hunt and open BCG’s Washington, DC, office, an office that had been a year in the planning. He was a senior partner; I was a manager at the time. I had already moved my family to DC to start two of my children in school. Steve and his spouse were going to f ..read more

If you’ve ever gazed up at a dark and clear night sky, you might feel the same thing that I do each and every time: a feeling that it’s beckoning us and drawing us in to explore and wonder what’s out there in the great abyss of space. Each point of distant, twinkling light isn’t just a star in its own right, but also a chance: for planets, for biochemistry, and for life. If we really allow our imaginations to run wild, we might even imagine the existence of something better than mere life, such as the existence of intelligent, self-aware, and technologically advanced civilizations. But that b ..read more

Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic about hackers and computer viruses set in an Orwellian Los Angeles. Jeff Bezos cites Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, which unreel in an utopian society of humanoids and artificial intelligences, often orchestrated by “Minds,” a powerful AI. Elon Musk named three of SpaceX ..read more

It was a long shot to trust the northern New England weather in early April, especially after a strange winter of warm spells followed by massive snowstorms. But hundreds of thousands of people gambled, or trusted their weather apps, and, as the atmospheric gods would have it, we were all in for a spectacular celestial treat. Clear blue skies, low humidity, great visibility. I drove for about 2.5 hours from Hanover to the north of New Hampshire with my two sons to an iconic mountain outcrop called Dixville Notch, part of a state park. There, we were to hike up for under a mile to reach Table ..read more

When it comes to the Universe, there are some things we can be confident are out there based on what we observe. We know that the Universe was hotter, denser, and more uniform in the distant past. We know that the stars and galaxies in the Universe have grown up and evolved as the Universe has aged. We know that gravitation has formed the large-scale structure in the Universe, and that structure has grown more complex over time. And we also know how much normal matter, altogether, is present in the Universe, and that it isn’t sufficient to explain the full suite of the gravitational effects t ..read more