文化・思想

What’s Important to Us When Making Political Decisions?

A core assumption in any democracy is that citizens with access to information will make reasoned decisions on political candidates and policy issues. But a new study by UC Berkeley social scientists finds that Americans usually don’t consider the full scope of difficult issues, instead basing their opinions on mental shortcuts that sidestep complexity. The paper offers striking insight into the differences in cognitive reasoning patterns among Americans. While some people in the study did closely analyze a range of issues before coming to an opinion, others did a quick back-of-the-napkin tall

Greater Good · EN

Can You Learn to Feel More Loved?

Imagine you have a colleague who remembers that you had a difficult appointment and checks in on you. Or a friend who is just there to listen without telling you what you should have done differently. We don’t tend to think of these experiences as grand declarations of love, but they leave us with a certain lingering warmth: the feeling of being loved. In our research, we coined the term felt love to focus on the receiver’s side of love. This emphasis shifts attention away from the expressions of love (i.e., loving signals). While expressions are actions we choose to take, felt love is an inte

Greater Good · EN

How Young People Are Researching Issues That Matter to Them

“Adults should take students more seriously, as they have voices and different opinions too” — Middle school student Middle school students in a California school district noticed that their perspectives were not included in decisions related to school policy that they cared about, like the dress code. They engaged in research to explore how administrators, teachers, and staff could incorporate their voices in decision-making processes. Students conducted surveys and focus groups with their peers and developed recommendations for their school, including more student-led events and a more activ

Greater Good · EN

Four Practices to Help You Feel More Engaged at Work

Work can be tough. With only 20% of workers feeling engaged globally, we need tools that can help boost engagement and well-being at work. While some difficulty at work may always be expected, there are things we can do to take control of our work lives and bring more kindness, appreciation, connection, and trust into the workplace. For many years, researchers have been testing different practices that individual employees, managers, and teams can do to improve work life for everyone. You can find some of these on Greater Good in Action, our library of over 100 practices found to improve well-

Greater Good · EN

Happiness Break: A Meditation to Help You Sit with Grief

This guided meditation with end-of-life doula Andrea Sexton-Dumas offers a gentle way to make space for grief by imagining sharing your heartache with a plant, releasing it into the soil, and nurturing the earth that holds it.

Greater Good · EN

Your Happiness Calendar for November 2026

Our monthly Happiness Calendar is a day-by-day guide to well-being. This month, we hope it helps you pause to notice good things. To open the clickable calendar, click on the image below. (Please note: If you are having trouble clicking on calendar links with the Chrome browser, try these tips to fix the issue or try a different browser.) {embed="happiness_calendar/subscribe"} View the latest calendar here.

Greater Good · EN

Why Sending Reels Is More Meaningful Than You Think

Humans are constantly reinventing ways to maintain intimacy with the people we care about most. Today, one of our most ubiquitous connection rituals is reel sharing—that is, sending short social media videos to each other. At a time when much of the conversation about technology centers on how it is eroding human connection, reel sharing and the unspoken social norms that surround it suggest another possibility: a tool to maintain social bonds. This has been my experience. I met my best friend of more than 25 years, Kyra, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer. Our friendship formed before social

Greater Good · EN

An Inside Look At How To Tame Unstoppable AI

The post An Inside Look At How To Tame Unstoppable AI appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

What We Can Save In A Time Of Endings

The post What We Can Save In A Time Of Endings appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

When The Present Eats The Future

The post When The Present Eats The Future appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

Sudan As A Mirror For Today’s World

The post Sudan As A Mirror For Today’s World appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

Noema’s AI Reading List

The post Noema’s AI Reading List appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

Turbulent Times Call For Experimental Law

The post Turbulent Times Call For Experimental Law appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

A New Dawn For Mathematical Progress

The post A New Dawn For Mathematical Progress appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

The Sediment Of Culture Shapes Political Order

The post The Sediment Of Culture Shapes Political Order appeared first on NOEMA .

Noema · EN

Inside the cartoon library

Curators Jenny Robb and Caitlin McGurk took me on a 45-minute guided tour of one of my favorite places: the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum on the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio. Really fun. Watch the video.

Austin Kleon · EN

Typewriter interviews with Roz Chast and Paul Noth

This was not entirely pre-planned, but: it turns out I’m publishing a typewriter interview with a cartoonist every week of October, and I just now realized they’re all contributors to The New Yorker. The first two are Roz Chast and Paul Noth! (Can you guess the other two?)

Austin Kleon · EN

Are we a teardown or a fixer-upper?

Last week’s newsletter began: An out-of-town developer tore a house down at the end of my street and cut down every single tree on the lot. As I watched the big T-Rex excavator claw down the walls, a thought ran through my head: If it can be built, it can be torn down. True of […]

Austin Kleon · EN

Archival issues

I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc. But […]

Austin Kleon · EN

On baseball

I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole newsletter about the game called “Baseball on the brain.” It begins: “It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and […]

Austin Kleon · EN

Typewriter interview with Lisa Hanawalt

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Lisa Hanawalt.

Austin Kleon · EN

On nemeses

I used this poem at the top of my letter, “Everything you can see.” See also: “Do you have a nemesis?”

Austin Kleon · EN

P S Y C H O ! (a mixtape)

This mix began as a Halloween party mix (complete with “Monster Mash”) and then morphed into something weirder and scarier, I think: a mix of songs (mostly) about being crazy — maybe even psychotically! — in love. (The more you listen to love songs the more you realize, “Man, this person is not well!”) These […]

Austin Kleon · EN

Can our data center expertise help with AI verification?

(Also posted on EA Forum .) Treaties to pause training or otherwise restrict dangerous uses of AI would require difficult verification schemes. Plan A's proposal is that network taps inside data centers would record copies of traffic (or hashes of it), and later recomputations on random samples could check whether sampled outputs match declared workloads, as part of a broader verification scheme. I'm an AI engineer at a company building tools for the construction industry. Much of our work is with data centers. The architects, engineers and construction managers on our team work every week wit

LessWrong · EN