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A conversation with the CEO of AB InBev.
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6 min
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Literature has always been slow to adapt to new technologies, which on the one hand might be its saving grace but could just as well lead to its demise.
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3 min
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“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth and “Kalooki Nights” by Howard Jacboson are Safran Foer’s picks for the best novels about the Holocaust—even though they are not explicitly about the genocide.
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1 min
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Safran Foer likens the experience of watching films of his novels to hearing his own voice on an answering machine—except far stranger.
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2 min
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Comedy may be difficult to pull off, but comedians can at least gauge their success by the audience’s laughter. For writers, there is no similar criterion by which to judge […]
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4 min
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Though some claim factory farming is necessary to feed the Third World, it requires seven calories of input to generate one calorie of food.
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4 min
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Safran Foer says Pollan is the most important and sensible food writer in American history, but he disagrees with Pollan over the idea of “table fellowship.” “We’re past the point […]
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3 min
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A recent study calculated the environmental costs of a 50-cent fast food hamburger to be 400 times its price at the register.
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4 min
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Eating meat is a part of our cultural and personal identity—think Christmas hams or Thanksgiving turkeys—but the factory farming system is not sustainable.
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3 min
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A conversation with the writer.
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24 min
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The neurotransmitter dopamine is crucial for learning adaptive behaviors, but addictive drugs exploit this normal mechanism by flooding the brain with dopamine.
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3 min
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“Your legs couldn’t tell you Newton’s laws, but they still obey them, and of course your brain might not be able to explain the laws of statistics, but it still […]
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2 min
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Kepecs uses rats to study the neurology of decision-making because their brains are evolutionarily similar to ours but much simpler. Likewise, if you wanted to learn how cars worked, you […]
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8 min
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A conversation with the neuroscientist.
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7 min
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Being able to retain some sense of control during his kidnapping—albeit small—helped Alpert overcome the trauma of the experience.
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4 min
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Humanizing yourself and creating a bond with your captor enhances your chances of survival, but sometimes you will also need to be deceptive.
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6 min
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The NYPD and FBI both agree that Alpert should not have survived his kidnapping; Alpert shares with us the strategies he used to stay alive.
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8 min
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Former federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped at gunpoint on his 38th birthday, kept his wits during the harrowing 25-hour ordeal, convinced his captors to release him, and then helped […]
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7 min
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A conversation with the writer and kidnapping survivor.
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24 min
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Every choice we make involves calculating the risk versus the reward, but if we mistake luck for skill, as was the case on Wall Street, these calculations become meaningless.
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2 min
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Survival expert Laurence Gonzales explains how to increase your chances of surviving some of the most common deadly scenarios.
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3 min
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The characteristics that increase your chance of survival in extraordinary situations can also help you manage the daily trials of life.
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3 min
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The rule of thumb is that humans can survive three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food, but there are always extraordinary cases—some have gone […]
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3 min
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The people who are likely to survive against all odds are not “weekend warriors” but rather those who are persistent, prepared, organized, and calm in extreme situations.
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2 min
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A conversation with the author and survival expert.
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13 min
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Controlling other people’s dreams may be science fiction, but there are ways to control our own dreams, Harris says.
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1 min
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For patients with narcolepsy, a loud noise or a strong emotion can trigger the body to fall asleep instantly.
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2 min
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During REM sleep, the body is paralyzed so that the sleeper does not act out his dreams, but when this phenomenon malfunctions, bizarre sleep disorders like sleep paralysis and REM […]
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3 min
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Harris practices Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, which teaches patients to take control of nightmares by rehearsing them during the day and changing them into positive scenarios. 90% of Harris’s patients report […]
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6 min
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Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed that dreams were windows into the unconscious, but many scientists now believe they may have no deeper meaning.
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2 min
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