Jay Matthews

On anxiety or curiosity as responses to a partner's 'other'-ness

I mean, faced with the unknown of our partners, we can either be anxious — and this is true with the unknown of life. We can be anxious, we can want to close the gap, we can want to seek the familiar in that space, or we can leave that space open and respond

to it with curiosity. And

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I believe the best way to describe this shift is as a shift from legible ambition to illegible ambition. The reason so many people cling to default metrics of success is that other people understand them. Legible ambition is a story that your parents can tell their friends. We fear that not having such legible ambition means we will be cast out of... See more

Wilczek then takes this idea to another level: Can beauty be not just a byproduct of science, but a fundamental principle of how the world works? In other words, can physicists use it to guide themselves to new insights, the way they use mathematical intuition, experimentation and other things? Wilczek believes they can—and they have.

On relationships with others in the field: “It’s a very important medium-term project to bring China into the international scientific community in a worthy way,” he says. “There’s a tremendous hunger for research and knowledge in science there. I wish it weren’t so politically fraught.”

We cannot breathe. This is our mantra in America now.

Adam Grant and Samir Nurmohamed Grant shows how Brad bird united his team by rallying against a common enemy. The enemy in this case was the outside expectation that they would fail. Samir Nurmohamed expands on this with Adam: In a study with job seekers who had faced discrimination in their careers, Samir randomly assigned some of them to tell a... See more

The way that education can lock us into careers, or at least substantially direct the route we travel, would not be so problematic if we were excellent judges of our future interests and characters.

Kropotkin pointed out that Darwin’s own comments regarding the survival value of the social instincts are widely ignored. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin described how animal species in which cooperation among individuals replaced competitive struggle were able to secure the best conditions for survival. He implied that, in such cases, the... See more

For a long time their relationship operated on a contract of mutuality. They were not to express feelings or needs that exceeded what they had been allocated. They were not to be irrational, insensitive, or greedy. Now, however, they both were making strong claims. They made demands on each other that they didn’t want to give up on. There was a lot... See more