Walking through a field one day, a 17-year-old schoolteacher named George Boole had a vision. His head was full of abstract mathematics — ideas about how to use algebra to solve complex calculus problems. Suddenly, he was struck with a flash of insight: that thought itself might be expressed in algebraic form.
Boole was born on November 2, 1815, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in Lincoln, England. He was the first child of John Boole, a shoemaker, and his wife Mary Ann. But John was no ordinary shoemaker — he was an enthusiast of science and mathematics, as likely to be making telescopes as shoes. Appropriately, his son George received a quality education, studying the classics as well as mathematics and learning to play the flute and piano. He quickly became fluent in Latin and Greek, and his translations of classical poems were published in the local newspaper when he was 14 (creating some controversy when a reader refused to believe they were the work of a schoolboy). When his father’s business began to fail a couple of years later, ... Continue Reading »
Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that’s new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field’s issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied all of the greatest minds in the field that approached those problems previously. They wind up revolutionizing their field, and the world is never the same. It leaves one with a strong take-home message: that if you were that inexperienced person with a similarly towering intellect, and you had the good fortune of coming into a field just as that legend did, then you too could make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals are all currently missing.
That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Albert Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught ... Continue Reading »
We don’t often call people stupid. Unlike its sibling concepts of dumbness and idiocy, stupidity isn’t really a personality trait. Of course, you might think someone is stupid, but when we use the word, we tend to limit it to moments of stupidity. We say, “Well, that was a stupid thing to do” or “You’re being stupid.” Stupidity is a blip.
In fact, somewhat ironically, stupidity is often defined in contrast to otherwise normal and intelligent activities. We say “you’re being stupid” because we expect the person to be sensible otherwise.
Stupidity is not tied to IQ — as dumbness is — or the ability to assess risks — as being foolish is. Stupidity is an action, one defined by its implications. A Nobel Prize-winning professor can be stupid. A five-year-old can be stupid. We can all be stupid. But do enough stupid things in too short a period, and people might start whispering, “I think he might just be stupid.”
So, here is Carlo Cipolla’s “golden law of stupidity” on how to spot and avoid acts of stupidity.
The golden law of stupidity
Cipolla ... Continue Reading »
One of the most important lessons we learn from studying the Universe is that none of the sources of light that we see — none of the stars, galaxies, stellar remnants, quasars, or heated matter — will continue to shine forever. After a finite amount of time, anything powered by nuclear fusion or infalling matter will run out of fuel. Anything that emits light because it’s hot will cool, and once it’s cooled enough, it won’t emit detectable light signatures any longer: not only ultraviolet and visible light, but infrared, microwave, and even radio emissions will eventually cease. Every point-like and every extended light source, even though they shine brilliantly and ubiquitously today, will someday be snuffed out.
For stars, there are three main fates that a star can have, all of which are heavily dependent on their mass at birth.
The most massive stars will burn through their fuel and undergo collapse: either direct collapse to a black hole or core-collapse, leading to a supernova. These stars can leave black holes, neutron stars, or nothing at all behind when they die.
The ... Continue Reading »
The great management guru Peter Drucker wrote about the need to observe how people work, identify their needs, and then translate that need into demand for something better. “The only purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Design firm IDEO and its CEO, Tim Brown, spent a career popularizing human-centered design and integrating it into corporate strategy—but what were the results? If it’s such a natural thing to do, why don’t we see more successes on the level of Uber, Airbnb, iPhone, Fitbit, eBay, and PayPal? The problem is that conventional research methods don’t uncover how people work and, importantly, how people work around problems to create jury-rigged solutions that satisfy them, at least for a time. So their needs may be obfuscated, obscured even, from them!
For example, I would love to have a pair of lightweight running shoes to use when I travel. Most of the weight in my suitcase is from shoes, and the rubber in running shoes is a big culprit. I haven’t found a shoe that meets my needs, and the rental of shoes ... Continue Reading »
In 2015, the New York Times ran a “Modern Love” column that might have made it into your inbox. The title, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” apparently tapped into some of our collective anxieties and quickly went viral. In the essay, writer Mandy Len Catron tells the story of using a set of increasingly intimate questions to get to know a potential romantic partner. The 36 questions, actually developed many years prior as an experimental research tool by Arthur Aron and colleagues, are designed to accelerate close connection between two people. They start with “easy” ones, like Would you like to be famous? In what way? (#2), but lead inexorably to If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet? (#33).
The purpose of this task was to help the pairs develop a close bond in a short period of time, by accelerating through the moments of connection that would otherwise naturally occur as a friendship or ... Continue Reading »
Today’s most urgent challenges — social fragmentation, educational inequity, food insecurity, environmental stress — seem to have trapped the world in gridlock.
Despite all our technological advances, we haven’t yet nailed the basics: Almost a third of the world’s population faces moderate to severe food insecurity; 70 percent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries struggle with reading comprehension; economic mobility is stagnant; the list goes on.
When the stats are bleak, it’s easy to feel disheartened. At the same time, people in communities around the world are still testing creative ways to address pressing problems.
“It’s a special power that we have as humans — to find a point of escape, to find the light when it feels like there is none,” says Adama Sanneh, co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting today’s creatives and helping them make positive change in their communities.
The foundation’s Creativity Pioneers Fund (CPF) supports light-finding organizations to bolster “unconventional solutions to the most urgent global challenges.” Youth unemployment in Nairobi? Restore and reactivate public libraries where young people can work. Food insecurity? Develop and maintain a vegetable seed bank. And on ... Continue Reading »
The more informed we are, the more successful we’ll be in our decision-making endeavors. That’s only true up to a point: it’s only true if the information we’ve acquired is accurate and truthful. Making good decisions doesn’t merely rely on how much information we take in, it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we’ve instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation — incorrect information that doesn’t align with factual reality — then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.
This isn’t a problem that’s new here in 2026; this is a problem as old as humanity itself. When someone is compelling to us, and their arguments are convincing to us, we tend to go along with them, lauding both the idea and the one who puts it forth. We’re even more vulnerable if the idea is something that appeals to us emotionally, playing on our fears, hopes, preconceptions, ... Continue Reading »
In 58 BC, Cicero’s house was ransacked. Returning from exile, the Roman statesman found his property vandalized; his scrolls jumbled, torn, and scattered. A library assumes an order, a schema, something that renders it sensible and accessible. Cicero’s was chaos.
Enter Tyrannio, a Greek specialist in literature and libraries, owner of some 30,000 scrolls and famed expert on Aristotle — in fact, the same man responsible for restoring the philosopher’s tattered library after it was hauled to Rome. Tyrannio stepped in to sort through Cicero’s mess. He identified volumes, repaired damage, organized the scrolls, and created title tags. Cicero marveled at the transformation.
“You will be surprised at Tyrannio’s excellent arrangement in my library,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus. When the work was complete, his appreciation verged on the mystical. “Since Tyrannio has arranged my books,” he wrote, “the house seems to have acquired a soul.”
It’s a poetic but poor translation. Cicero used the Latin word mens — not “soul,” but “mind.” Another translation says the house “recovered its intelligence.” And he’s not talking about Tyrannio’s intelligence, but rather the intelligence ... Continue Reading »
In leadership discourse, the spotlight often falls on strategy, execution, vision, and charismatic influence. Yet one of the most persistent failure modes for even the most outstanding leaders lies not in what they do, but in what they fail to sense: the emotional currents around them, the whispers hidden behind applause. It turned out to be Julius Caesar’s fatal trap, a figure who conquered nations, reshaped Rome, and rewrote what leadership looked like. Caesar’s sudden and tragic end to his career at the hands of his followers was not due to arrogance or a power grab. It resulted from a deficit in emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), the quiet skill that sustains trust once one attains a leadership position. Something that Caesar could well have prevented.
A legendary rise — and an under-appreciated blind spot
Julius Caesar’s rise more than two millennia ago was stellar: both in Roman government and as a general. Ever since, Caesar remains one of history’s most compelling case studies in leadership. His career offers timeless lessons about influence, reputation, and human behavior inside large, competitive systems. His ... Continue Reading »
Walking through a field one day, a 17-year-old schoolteacher named George Boole had a vision. His head was full of abstract mathematics — ideas about how to use algebra to solve complex calculus problems. Suddenly, he was struck with a flash of insight: that thought itself might be expressed in algebraic form.
Boole was born on November 2, 1815, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in Lincoln, England. He was the first child of John Boole, a shoemaker, and his wife Mary Ann. But John was no ordinary shoemaker — he was an enthusiast of science and mathematics, as likely to be making telescopes as shoes. Appropriately, his son George received a quality education, studying the classics as well as mathematics and learning to play the flute and piano. He quickly became fluent in Latin and Greek, and his translations of classical poems were published in the local newspaper when he was 14 (creating some controversy when a reader refused to believe they were the work of a schoolboy). When his father’s business began to fail a couple of years later, ... 
Perhaps the most commonly told myth in all of science is that of the lone genius. The blueprint for it goes something like this. Once upon a time in history, someone with a towering intellect but no formal training wades into a field that’s new to them for the first time. Upon considering the field’s issues, they immediately see things that no one else has ever seen before. With just a little bit of hard work, they find solutions to puzzles that have stymied all of the greatest minds in the field that approached those problems previously. They wind up revolutionizing their field, and the world is never the same. It leaves one with a strong take-home message: that if you were that inexperienced person with a similarly towering intellect, and you had the good fortune of coming into a field just as that legend did, then you too could make those great breakthroughs that the world’s greatest professionals are all currently missing.
That’s the myth we frequently tell ourselves about Albert Einstein. That he, an outcast and a dropout, taught ... 
We don’t often call people stupid. Unlike its sibling concepts of dumbness and idiocy, stupidity isn’t really a personality trait. Of course, you might think someone is stupid, but when we use the word, we tend to limit it to moments of stupidity. We say, “Well, that was a stupid thing to do” or “You’re being stupid.” Stupidity is a blip.
In fact, somewhat ironically, stupidity is often defined in contrast to otherwise normal and intelligent activities. We say “you’re being stupid” because we expect the person to be sensible otherwise.
Stupidity is not tied to IQ — as dumbness is — or the ability to assess risks — as being foolish is. Stupidity is an action, one defined by its implications. A Nobel Prize-winning professor can be stupid. A five-year-old can be stupid. We can all be stupid. But do enough stupid things in too short a period, and people might start whispering, “I think he might just be stupid.”
So, here is Carlo Cipolla’s “golden law of stupidity” on how to spot and avoid acts of stupidity.
The golden law of stupidity
Cipolla ... 
One of the most important lessons we learn from studying the Universe is that none of the sources of light that we see — none of the stars, galaxies, stellar remnants, quasars, or heated matter — will continue to shine forever. After a finite amount of time, anything powered by nuclear fusion or infalling matter will run out of fuel. Anything that emits light because it’s hot will cool, and once it’s cooled enough, it won’t emit detectable light signatures any longer: not only ultraviolet and visible light, but infrared, microwave, and even radio emissions will eventually cease. Every point-like and every extended light source, even though they shine brilliantly and ubiquitously today, will someday be snuffed out.
For stars, there are three main fates that a star can have, all of which are heavily dependent on their mass at birth.
The most massive stars will burn through their fuel and undergo collapse: either direct collapse to a black hole or core-collapse, leading to a supernova. These stars can leave black holes, neutron stars, or nothing at all behind when they die.
The ... 
The great management guru Peter Drucker wrote about the need to observe how people work, identify their needs, and then translate that need into demand for something better. “The only purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.”
Design firm IDEO and its CEO, Tim Brown, spent a career popularizing human-centered design and integrating it into corporate strategy—but what were the results? If it’s such a natural thing to do, why don’t we see more successes on the level of Uber, Airbnb, iPhone, Fitbit, eBay, and PayPal? The problem is that conventional research methods don’t uncover how people work and, importantly, how people work around problems to create jury-rigged solutions that satisfy them, at least for a time. So their needs may be obfuscated, obscured even, from them!
For example, I would love to have a pair of lightweight running shoes to use when I travel. Most of the weight in my suitcase is from shoes, and the rubber in running shoes is a big culprit. I haven’t found a shoe that meets my needs, and the rental of shoes ... 
In 2015, the New York Times ran a “Modern Love” column that might have made it into your inbox. The title, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” apparently tapped into some of our collective anxieties and quickly went viral. In the essay, writer Mandy Len Catron tells the story of using a set of increasingly intimate questions to get to know a potential romantic partner. The 36 questions, actually developed many years prior as an experimental research tool by Arthur Aron and colleagues, are designed to accelerate close connection between two people. They start with “easy” ones, like Would you like to be famous? In what way? (#2), but lead inexorably to If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet? (#33).
The purpose of this task was to help the pairs develop a close bond in a short period of time, by accelerating through the moments of connection that would otherwise naturally occur as a friendship or ... 
Today’s most urgent challenges — social fragmentation, educational inequity, food insecurity, environmental stress — seem to have trapped the world in gridlock.
Despite all our technological advances, we haven’t yet nailed the basics: Almost a third of the world’s population faces moderate to severe food insecurity; 70 percent of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries struggle with reading comprehension; economic mobility is stagnant; the list goes on.
When the stats are bleak, it’s easy to feel disheartened. At the same time, people in communities around the world are still testing creative ways to address pressing problems.
“It’s a special power that we have as humans — to find a point of escape, to find the light when it feels like there is none,” says Adama Sanneh, co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting today’s creatives and helping them make positive change in their communities.
The foundation’s Creativity Pioneers Fund (CPF) supports light-finding organizations to bolster “unconventional solutions to the most urgent global challenges.” Youth unemployment in Nairobi? Restore and reactivate public libraries where young people can work. Food insecurity? Develop and maintain a vegetable seed bank. And on ... 
The more informed we are, the more successful we’ll be in our decision-making endeavors. That’s only true up to a point: it’s only true if the information we’ve acquired is accurate and truthful. Making good decisions doesn’t merely rely on how much information we take in, it also depends on the quality of that information. If what we’ve instead ingested and accepted is misinformation or disinformation — incorrect information that doesn’t align with factual reality — then we not only become susceptible to grift and fraud ourselves, but we risk having our minds captured by charismatic charlatans. When that occurs, we can lose everything: money, trust, relationships, and even our mental independence.
This isn’t a problem that’s new here in 2026; this is a problem as old as humanity itself. When someone is compelling to us, and their arguments are convincing to us, we tend to go along with them, lauding both the idea and the one who puts it forth. We’re even more vulnerable if the idea is something that appeals to us emotionally, playing on our fears, hopes, preconceptions, ... 
In 58 BC, Cicero’s house was ransacked. Returning from exile, the Roman statesman found his property vandalized; his scrolls jumbled, torn, and scattered. A library assumes an order, a schema, something that renders it sensible and accessible. Cicero’s was chaos.
Enter Tyrannio, a Greek specialist in literature and libraries, owner of some 30,000 scrolls and famed expert on Aristotle — in fact, the same man responsible for restoring the philosopher’s tattered library after it was hauled to Rome. Tyrannio stepped in to sort through Cicero’s mess. He identified volumes, repaired damage, organized the scrolls, and created title tags. Cicero marveled at the transformation.
“You will be surprised at Tyrannio’s excellent arrangement in my library,” Cicero wrote to his friend Atticus. When the work was complete, his appreciation verged on the mystical. “Since Tyrannio has arranged my books,” he wrote, “the house seems to have acquired a soul.”
It’s a poetic but poor translation. Cicero used the Latin word mens — not “soul,” but “mind.” Another translation says the house “recovered its intelligence.” And he’s not talking about Tyrannio’s intelligence, but rather the intelligence ... 
In leadership discourse, the spotlight often falls on strategy, execution, vision, and charismatic influence. Yet one of the most persistent failure modes for even the most outstanding leaders lies not in what they do, but in what they fail to sense: the emotional currents around them, the whispers hidden behind applause. It turned out to be Julius Caesar’s fatal trap, a figure who conquered nations, reshaped Rome, and rewrote what leadership looked like. Caesar’s sudden and tragic end to his career at the hands of his followers was not due to arrogance or a power grab. It resulted from a deficit in emotional intelligence (EI or EQ), the quiet skill that sustains trust once one attains a leadership position. Something that Caesar could well have prevented.
A legendary rise — and an under-appreciated blind spot
Julius Caesar’s rise more than two millennia ago was stellar: both in Roman government and as a general. Ever since, Caesar remains one of history’s most compelling case studies in leadership. His career offers timeless lessons about influence, reputation, and human behavior inside large, competitive systems. His ...