I first heard of party lines from a customer in rural Canada who said, “when you call me back, it’ll ring for a while before I answer because it’s a party line.” I had no idea what he was talking […]
Shane Parrish writes about how the ancient code created aligned incentives between builders of buildings and their residents, which increased the odds of structures that didn’t collapse once the builder had moved on. | learn more
Retailers trying to compete the old away against Amazon are asking for trouble. Obviously, they need to find an edge in some other way. I expected to skim this article and archive it forever, but ended up reading it in […]
JD Vance does a nice job of story-telling in this book about his hillbilly family and their cultural origins. He really gives a voice to his people that we “urban elites” are unlikely to have seen firsthand. Though I felt […]
“What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they’re all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is, the process that […]
A new study based on UK data concludes that most wealth has been accumulated by being idle rather than working hard. | learn more
We shouldn’t be surprised, but… “The sugar industry pulled the plug on an animal study it funded in the 1960s. Initial results pointed to a link between sugar consumption and elevated triglycerides, which raises heart disease risk.” | learn more
I hadn’t thought about this before, but it makes a lot of sense. “Numerous studies over the past few years have shown that taking fever reducers hurts your body’s ability to recover from an illness.” | learn more
In the business environment of today, it seems people are always pushing themselves to do more and work harder. Matt Plummer, founder of employee training company Zarvana, writes in the Harvard Business Review about his method for doing more with […]
“Should we generalize or specialize? This article explores how Shakespeare and Da Vinci excelled by branching out from their core competencies.” Side note: I’ve heard before that Shakespeare might not have been a real individual, but that doesn’t detract from […]