In a 2014 study, Stanford researchers found the simple act of taking a stroll doubled your capacity for creative thoughts. Other studies show regular walks increase connectivity in regions associated with creativity.

A thread on walking and thinking...

adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/the-thinking… Darwin built a gravel path around an oak grove at Down House, the estate where he lived for 40 years while developing his theory of evolution. He walked multiple loops on it almost every day.

He called it his “thinking path.”

Two things can be true: First, no one before @elonmusk ever became the richest person in the world by deliberately setting out to reduce existential risk for humanity. Second, his talents are ill-suited to solve the problem that is Twitter.

adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/solving-for-… Musk talks a lot about running his business from the “first principles” of physics. But Twitter is a political and sociological problem—a problem rooted in conflicts over values—not an engineering problem. It requires a different set of skills.

Four years ago, our youngest son suddenly began having grand mal seizures. It was terrifying for us as parents, but in a strange way it prepared us for one of the most vexing things about COVID: calculating risk in situations with imperfect information.
adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/the-great-af… Overnight, we found ourselves in a world that was teeming with potential threats, where the “official guidance” on how you should change your behavior was murky or nonexistent.

Gather round, kids, and let me tell you the story of a strange and powerful software program from many moons ago called… Hypercard. adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/designing-a-… Brian Eno once apparently said of the Velvet Underground that only 30,000 people bought their first album, but all of them went on to start their own band. Hypercard was kind of the VU of early interface design. arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/0…

In the summer of 1695, British pirates committed a terrible series of crimes off the coast of Western India—acts that led to the first global manhunt and one of history's great disappearing acts. Three centuries later, new clues are emerging about what actually happened. (Thread) (Some of what follows is told at greater length in my book Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt, now out in paperback.) penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545158/e…

We know humans are living much longer than our ancestors a century ago, but what about our distant ancestors? Has 8,000 years of civilization improved average lifespans compared to our hunter-gatherer past? How we answered that question is a detective story—and a cautionary tale. (This story is told in my new book, Extra Life: A Short History Of Living Longer — also a PBS/BBC series co-hosted with @davidolusoga.) penguinrandomhouse.com/books/594501/e…

You may know W. E. B. DuBois as the author of The Souls of Black Folk and the founder of the NAACP. But did you know he was also a data visualization pioneer and invented techniques to understand health inequalities that were decades ahead of their time? (@DavidOlusoga and I tell this story in tonight’s episode of Extra Life on @pbs at 8PM/7Central — the episode is all about the surprising power of data to save lives, and DuBois is one of its central protagonists. The episode will air on BBC4 next Tues.)

pbs.org/show/extra-lif…

Is the doubling of global life expectancy just a statistical sleight-of-hand? I get this a lot. Adults aren’t *really* living longer, the argument goes; it’s just that infant mortality has dropped.

But that argument is misguided, for a number of reasons. Let me count the ways. (Some of what follows is briefly referenced in my @NytMag essay from this weekend, and it’s covered more extensively in my book Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer, which comes out next week.)

nytimes.com/2021/04/27/mag…

THREAD: If you had to pick one chart to represent the last hundred years or so of the modern age, what would it be? I think it would have to be this one, tracking the changes in global life expectancy from 1900 to today. A century ago, at the end of the Great Influenza, global life expectancy was in the mid 30s. In the US, it was 47. In places like India, it was in the mid 20s, lower than the average lifespan in most hunter-gatherer societies.

Here’s a question that’s been running in my mind the last few days. Everyone has been saying that the US COVID-19 cases are tracking Italy’s almost exactly, just lagging ten days behind… [thread] But we all know the US case number is meaningless, because of the lack of tests. It’s clearly much higher than the official number. It could be 10x the official number, no one knows. Just the number of COVID-positive celebrities/athletes makes me think it's much higher.

A book like FARSIGHTED that synthesizes research from a wide range of fields inevitably draws on many other works for inspiration. So I thought I’d share some of the key texts in this thread so people can keep reading (after finishing FARSIGHTED of course) penguinrandomhouse.com/books/309724/f… Darwin on Man: A Psychological Study of Scientific Creativity, by Howard Gruber. (Now out of print I believe.) A brilliant deep dive into Darwin’s notebooks, which ultimately led me to Darwin’s pros and cons list that opens FARSIGHTED.