Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
There’s nothing wrong with hoping for the best. But the best-case scenario is rarely the one that comes to pass. Being realistic about what is likely to happen positions you for a range of possible outcomes and gives you peace of mind. We …
If you’re trying to gain a rapid understanding of a new area, one of the most important things you can do is to identify common mistakes people make, then avoid them. Here are some of the most predictable errors we tend to make when …
In the search for happiness, we often confuse how something looks with how it’s likely to make us feel. This is especially true when it comes to our homes. If we want to maximize happiness, we need to prioritize experiences over …
Our devotion to our values gets tested in the face of a true crisis. But it’s also an opportunity to reconnect, recommit, and sometimes, bake some bread. *** The recent outbreak of the coronavirus is impacting people all over the world — …
What if eating right wasn’t actually all that complicated? What if you read enough to see patterns develop, to realize that when you stripped away all the confusing bits that maybe the skeleton underneath was actually pretty simple? This is …
(This post is the second in a two-part series on the work of Judith Rich Harris. See the first part here.) As we concluded Part 1 of our exploration of Judith Rich Harris’s work on human personality, we had begun sketching out her …
“My solution to the mystery is that three perpetrators are involved: three mental systems that go about their business in different ways. Together, these three can answer the hows, whys, whens, and wheres of personality …
Last year, the wonderful Gary Taubes, whose ideas about nutrition we have written about before, gave a commencement address to the students of the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in California. The address is …
We’ve been told for decades that dietary fat makes us gain weight, yet research suggests refined carbohydrates are to blame. It’s time to turn the food pyramid upside down. Let’s examine the truth about what causes weight gain – …
From the excellent Mindfulness in Plain English: Concentration and mindfulness are distinctly different functions. They each have their role to play in meditation, and the relationship between them is definite and delicate. Concentration is …
Mindfulness is at one and the same time both bare attention itself and the function of reminding us to pay bare attention if we have ceased to do so. According to the excellent, Mindfulness in Plain English, there are three fundamental …
For any of you who have experienced a ‘runner’s high’ or endorphin rush while exercising you know how powerful the feeling can be. But there are many more chemicals at play than just endorphins and they can do much more than just make you …
Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading and how much of it you soak up has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors to bind neurons together. Exercise has …
[quote]Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to the very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by medicine, technology, and strangers.[/quote] Atul Gawande is one of my favorite writers. Aside …
I was excited to read John Durant’s book The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health. Whether or not you’re interested in paleo, it’s full of interesting nuggets. Especially the part where Durant explains how …
What can and should be done about human carnivory? Vaclav Smil answers in this adapted excerpt from Should We Eat Meat?: Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory: There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many …
As a follow up to the Michael Pollan food as culture post (on his new book Cooked), a reader passed along a link to this video on Pollan’s 2006 classic The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The Omnivore’s Dilemma …
Food is so much more than a label. Food is cultural. As a culture, we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the amount of time spent preparing meals has fallen by half. While the global trend is the …
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts. These are not separate fields, she argues in her book, …
A summary of a recent talk by Michael Pollan about what we know about food. We are ignoring the elephant in the room when we only talk nutrients — this way of eating is killing us. For example by demonising fat in the late ‘70s and early …
Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think will change the way you think about your next meal. According to eating behavior expert Brian Wansink the mind makes food-related decisions, more than 200 a day, and many of them without pause …
Daniel Lieberman, author of The Evolution of the Human Head, sat down with the NYT for an interesting conversation. Some years ago, I was doing an experiment where I put pigs on treadmills. The goal was to learn how running stressed the …
One thing that has always baffled me is how we get fat. Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes unearths the biological truth around why we’re getting fat. In the process, Taubes dispels many accepted ideas on weight-loss and nutrition. While …
In Robert Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us. But can sugar possibly be as bad as Lustig says? Lustig’s argument is that sugar has unique characteristics, …