psychology
- The Right Answer for a Robot
The maths says invest a windfall all at once, and the maths is right about two-thirds of the time. It's still the wrong advice for a lot of people - because the thing you're actually trying to manage isn't the market, it's the one asset no formula can optimise: your own nerve.
- Everyone Still Wants Two
The panic over falling birth rates argues about headcount and about whether children make you happy. Both miss the one number that matters: people still want about two kids and end up with about one and a half. The gap isn't ideology. It's the housing.
- Same Crime, Same Sentence?
Two identical cases can get wildly different verdicts with no bias anywhere. Why we obsess over the flaw with a villain and ignore the one without.
- The Machine That Always Agrees
An AI companion talked some people out of suicide, and the same class of product is named in lawsuits after others died. Same technology, opposite endings. What decides the direction is the one feature it can't switch off.
- What You're Actually Holding
A fund manager's wife spots a new product at the supermarket checkout, and it becomes one of the great stocks of the decade. That story is why everyone thinks fast-growing companies are about the discovery. The discovery was never the hard part.
- The Hot Hand Had a Bug
For thirty years the science said streaks were an illusion. Then someone found the error in the counting.
- The Body Always Takes It Back
Ozempic looks like the end of the willpower era. The trials say something quieter and harder: the drug never resets what your body defends. It holds the line by force, and only while you keep paying.
- The Vitamin You Aren't Missing
We file supplements under "can't hurt, might help." A cancer-prevention trial stopped early in 1996 kills the first half, and the big studies quietly bury the second. The word smuggles together two opposite acts, and only one of them is medicine.
- Why Very Smart People Get It Wrong
A decade after the 2016 election needle swung from 80% Clinton to >95% Trump in one night, we've built a whole industry that turns every question into a confident percentage. The lesson from that night is worth more now than it was then.
- A Border Is an Amplifier
Nations do not simply like friends and dislike enemies. Public feeling, official memory and strategic interest follow different maps—and borders turn up the volume on all three.
- The String Under the Table
Psychology can explain why we warm to some people. The awkward part is that honest rapport and manipulation use much of the same machinery.
- No Stop-Loss on a Forecast
In April 2014 every single economist in a 67-person survey said bond yields would rise. Yields fell. The problem isn't that the experts are stupid — it's that their opinion reaches you stripped of the only things that would let you act on it.
- Whose Finish Line?
The self-help shelf promises to make you successful. It never stops to ask whether "success" is even one thing. It isn't — and the reason runs deeper than "it's personal."
- The Short Century of Ambition
A generation is being called lazy for stepping back from the grind. But work as the meaning of a life is barely a hundred years old, and the young aren't cancelling the deal — they're doing the math on a deal that was already broken.
- All In, and Grinning
A whole generation of investors has never traded through a bear market. Here is the one trick that matters — and why even Druckenmiller, running the best fund of his era, couldn't dodge it.
- The Ape That Shaves Twice
Japan's record heat pushed men into shorts and the culture grew a new taboo within a season — "leg-hair harassment." The same machine that shaved women is now on men's shins, running the exact program evolution once ran to strip our fur, only faster.
- The Rational Gambler
A young generation's appetite for all-or-nothing bets looks reckless until you run the numbers from where they are standing. When the safe path stops clearing the bar, risk-seeking is what the textbook predicts.
- The Two Columns That Never Fight
Every comparison of strategic and tactical asset allocation ends up as the same tidy two-column table. It skips the only question that decides anything, and once you ask it, the choice you thought you had starts to dissolve.
- The Deathbed List Nobody Measured
The famous five regrets of the dying come from a blog post, not a study. What the evidence actually shows is stranger.
- The Open Cage
AI promises to end the necessity of work. History has run this experiment before — on a Pacific island, in oil states, in manor houses — and the results are stranger than either the utopians or the doomers admit.
- Still Someone in There
In late-stage dementia, some patients come back - clear, present, themselves - in the hours before death. The comforting reading is the least interesting one. The real question is where they were the whole time.
- We Have Always Paid in Dignity
Fans now wear diapers to hold the front row, and the internet has declared the end of civilization. Constantinople would like a word - and so would your Stone Age ancestors.
- The Same Way, Every Time
England lost the way England always loses. The real puzzle isn't why they choke — it's why knowing they choke doesn't stop it.
- Picture the Obstacle, Not the Trophy
Silva 'mind control' came back as 'visualization.' The science splits into a small real effect and a big sales pitch — and the version that actually works is the one nobody puts on a poster.
