Most political chiefs and business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight to slowly

... See more

In the early 1900s, the strain was so great that educational leader Abraham Flexner founded the Institute for Advanced Study as a place where a scientist could once again think about questions that were simply interesting, irrespective of their utility. In his now-classic essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” Flexner suggests that our concep

... See more