Author: Jason

This is what I call the “experimental mindset”. It makes use of your brain’s natural ability to generate predictions about what will happen next, and to learn when those predictions turn out to be wrong. Most of us experience this as failure and try to avoid that feeling – so we stick to the plan, we double down.

The experimental mindset does the opposite. Instead of asking, “Am I there yet?”, you ask, “What can I learn?” This helps you to try new approaches, pay attention to what actually happens, and change direction when the evidence points somewhere new. The life you end up building is yours, not a copy-paste of someone else’s blueprint for success.

So what does this look like when you’re weighing up whether to leave a job, if a relationship has a future, or how to rebuild your social life after a big move? It all starts with designing a tiny experiment.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/21/improve-career-health-relationships-experimental-mindset

And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

…

Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you – your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Your life is an orchestrated shuffle of technology. Your days are spent at work with the medium screen and you come home to unwind with the big screen; reflexively grabbing for the small screen every 2 to 7 minutes. Your screen time is 4 hours per day, 6 hours on the weekends, 7 if you’re hungover (you often are). It’s the midwest, after all. Fridays are for going out, Sundays are for boozy brunch. And repeat.

— Read on lizleatrice.substack.com/p/the-year-is-2063-and-you-were-never

We face a condition no people has faced before: a tool that acts not on the world but on the will itself. Such a tool endangers things that a tyrant never could.

The first thing it risks is autonomy: the cultivated capacity to author your own reasoning. This means framing the question, weighing what matters, and then owning your judgment. This is not the same thing as agency. Agency is about getting things done. Like Elena, you can simultaneously be highly agentic, but devoid of all autonomy.

The second loss is older and grander. Tocqueville feared that equality would cost us the potential for greatness. He arrived in America, half-afraid that the democratic age had extinguished thumos – what the Greeks called the part of the soul that loves honor, contest, and daring.

Tocqueville, however, found it on the merchant ship. At the end of volume I in Democracy in America, he tries to solve the mystery of how American merchants were able to offer cheaper rates and dominate transatlantic shipping. He finds the answer in temperament.

The American leaves Boston to buy tea in China, is gone two years and touches land once, lives off brackish water and salt meat, runs into the storm under full sail and mends the ship as he goes. He does all this to sell a pound of tea for a penny less than the Englishman. He does this because, as Tocqueville writes, the Americans put a kind of heroism in their manner of trading. The old fire does not die in a democratic age, it changes address.
— Read on blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/greatness-and-the-machine

D.C. will find itself in the top 1.1 percent of the planet’s hottest places on Friday, when high temperatures will soar toward 105 degrees.Only a few, far-flung places will be hotter.

D.C. is about to be hotter than 99 percent of the world – The Washington Post

In a series of experiments published in 2011, they found that having an uncompleted goal generated intrusive thoughts during completely different tasks and impaired performance on problem-solving exercises. The simple fact of having something pending (unresolved, undecided, or not written down anywhere reliable) consumed mental resources that should have been available for something else.

Here is, perhaps, the most useful finding in this entire area of research: in those same experiments, all the participants had to do was formulate a concrete, specific plan for tackling the pending task (not to complete it, but simply to decide when and how they would do it) for the intrusive thoughts to disappear and their performance to return to normal. The mind did not need the task to be completed. It needed it to be decided.
— Read on facilethings.com/blog/en/decision-fatigue

Even when a joke doesn’t elicit a guffaw, people may still experience the benefit by feeling uplifted by it, he said. And some research shows that emotions are tied to health and well-being.There’s also a cognitive response, known as wit, that can occur with humor. To understand a joke, people often need to shift their perspective, and studies suggest that this cognitive reframing can help regulate emotions and cope with stress, Sultanoff said.Dad jokes tap into not only wit but also the social dimension of humor — what Sultanoff calls relational fusion.

Science suggests cringe-worthy dad jokes may serve an actual purpose – The Washington Post

The police in Boston are searching for two boys who they said flashed a handgun at a pair of children running a lemonade stand on Wednesday and stole an undisclosed amount of cash from a bright pink lockbox.

The robbery, which occurred around 4:45 p.m., rattled South Boston, where it is common for children to set up lemonade stands in the summer for their first taste of the American dream. Many in the neighborhood couldn’t wrap their heads around why someone would target a pair of young entrepreneurs engaged in a time-honored childhood hustle.

Tiffany Byrne, the aunt of the two children working the lemonade stand, said that about $80 was taken.

“The fact that anyone could do this to children is horrible,” she said.

Children’s Lemonade Stand Is Robbed in Broad Daylight in Boston – The New York Times