Mary Martin

The sleeping giant is one name for the public; when it wakes up, when we wake up, we are no longer only the public: we are civil society, the superpower whose nonviolent means are sometimes, for a shining moment, more powerful than violence, more powerful than regimes and armies.

Taking the green pill is depressing, socially alienating, and deeply countercultural; those who make the leap often struggle to get their loved ones to see the obvious, all while being told by society that they are actually the weird ones. I’ve been one of these weird people since relatively early in life, and most of my time on Earth has been... See more

Empathy, or feeling with another, is not the same as compassion, or feeling for another. In empathy, we suffer with the other or share their joy or other emotions—we feel what they feel. Compassion, by comparison, involves care and concern for the person who suffers, and comes with a strong motivation to help and feelings of warmth and love. We... See more

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it

The nature cure: how time outdoors transforms our memory, imagination and logic

we’d argue that if you produce something iconic, you can create a cultural moment that ripples through people’s crowded psyches and impacts them deeply. And if you’re culturally and commercially successful, it paves the way for future experiments: it becomes easier to both sell tickets and sell ideas to potential clients.

Thinking about curiosity as going beyond the need for quick answers also highlights the power of what happens when we engage with un­­cert­ain­ty: having to ponder and anticipate answers can improve learning and memory, and curiosity can facilitate brain states that help us encode new information. Learning new things can be tough, but harnessing... See more

This Camera Takes 1,000 Years to Capture a Single Photograph