Nudging meat off the menu

How do you convince people to break the habit of a lifetime?

To keep global heating below 2°C, the world's appetite for meat must change.

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Why older people should be allowed to change their legal age

Discrimination against people because of their age is a real phenomenon.

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Let's say that on average you are in better shape than other people of your age. You are more able than them: quicker, sprightlier, livelier.

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What internet searches reveal about human sexuality

Polls never reveal who we really are. Google does.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Corbis via Getty Images
  • In Everybody Lies, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz discusses how Pornhub and Google data provide a window into human sexuality.
  • Large, anonymized data sets are more reliable indicators than polling or other traditional methods.
  • More people report having sex than actually having sex, Stephens-Davidowitz reports.
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Academic freedom prevents us from getting trapped in circles of delusion

Without expressing and evaluating ideas, we would never be able to determine what's right or wrong.

  • Pluralistic ignorance is a phenomenon in which a large groups of people publicly pretend to believe something is true, even if they privately believe it to be false, out of fear that their true opinions will be punished. Steven Pinker refers to this as a collective delusion.
  • "The ability to express an idea can puncture a bubble of collective, false knowledge and is one of the reasons that we have to cherish that freedom," says Pinker.
  • Free speech and freedom of inquiry must be protected in all arenas, but especially at universities because they are labs for testing ideas and furthering human knowledge. Without academic freedom, do universities deserve the esteem of society and the funding perks that keep them running?
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How time stopped circling and percolating and started running on tracks

Outside Europe, much of the world followed an assortment of rules and understandings about what time meant.

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Reflecting on Albrecht Altdorfer's painting Alexanderschlacht (1529), or The Battle of Alexander at Issus, the German historian Reinhart Koselleck wrote that, for medieval Europe, time was marked by 'expectations' and thus the painting was filled with portents.

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