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S1S2Feeling unmotivated? Use "Skinner's Law" to get yourself back on track  In 1780, hunched over a table at his home in London, Jeremy Bentham wrote the first lines of the first chapter of one of his most famous works. It read, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters: pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”
The British philosopher built an entire philosophy around this idea — that we are all motivated by pleasure and pain. Lucky for him, then, that almost all of the social sciences today agree with him. We are a hedonistic, happiness-seeking species who fear the pain-inflicting monsters of the world. Under all the pretense and bravado, we can be reduced to the simple push and pull mechanisms of the carrot and stick. After we get over the humbling and demoralizing simplicity of this, we can learn a few valuable lessons. We can game our own mechanisms and manipulate our Benthamite sovereigns. We can do anything. It’s all to do with something the writer George Mack called “Skinner’s Law.”
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S17S18S19How to Build 300,000 Airplanes in Five Years It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output. Even before the U.S. entered the war, the Americans provided hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to the Allies, and between 1938 and 1943 U.S. manufacturing output tripled as production of munitions ramped up. Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 5,600 cargo ships, 80,000 landing craft, 2.4 million trucks, 2.6 million machine guns, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition.
One of the most important elements in the “Arsenal of Democracy” was aircraft. Over the course of the war the U.S. produced around 325,000 airplanes valued at roughly $46 billion ($800 billion in 2024 dollars). Not only is this more aircraft than what Germany, Japan, and Italy combined produced during the war — it’s also more aircraft than have been built for commercial transport in the entire history of aviation.1
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S20S21Cement recycling method could help solve one of the world’s biggest climate challenges Concrete is the second-most-used material on the planet, after water, and is responsible for approximately 7.5% of total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. A scalable, cost-effective way of reducing concrete emissions while meeting global demand is one of the world’s biggest decarbonisation challenges.
The Cambridge researchers found that used cement is an effective substitute for lime flux, which is used in steel recycling to remove impurities and normally ends up as a waste product known as slag. But by replacing lime with used cement, the end product is recycled cement that can be used to make new concrete.
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S22The Power of Peer Groups (and How to Start One) A peer group is a group of professionals who meet on a regular basis to confidentially share their current issues and exchange insights that will help each member excel. Their benefits have been proven by successful leaders and workers for centuries. If you want to form a peer group of your own, take the following steps: Recruit the right members: Try to form a group of six to 10 people with diverse personal and professional backgrounds. Make sure you each respect one another, and are committed to meeting regularly throughout the year. Set guidelines. Agree upon how often you’ll meet, who will organize the agenda for your meetings, as well as who will moderate and keep time. Agree on values. Confidentiality, candor, empathy, and balance are required for your group to establish an inclusive and productive culture. Check in to keep up the momentum. Every few months, ask members for feedback to learn if the group dynamic is still beneficial for each member.
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S23All Business Strategies Fall into 4 Categories - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) The problem with strategy frameworks is that although they can help you determine whether an opportunity is attractive or whether a given strategy is likely to work, they generally don’t help you in the task of identifying the opportunity or crafting the strategy in the first place. This article introduces a framework, built on an in-depth analysis of the creativity literature, that aims to fill that gap by providing a systematic approach to identifying potential strategies. The framework categorizes all strategies into the following four groups, from the least creative to the most creative: adapting an existing industry strategy, combining different existing industry strategies, importing strategies from other industries, and creating a brand new strategy from scratch.
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S24S25Scaling a Midsize Startup - Harvard Business Review (No paywall) The “mighty-middle” segment of startups falls between venture-scale unicorns and small businesses. These startups aim for valuations in the high single-digit to high tens of millions within 5-10 years, targeting midsize niches with significant growth potential. Enabled by internet tools, global advertising, and affordable tech, mighty-middle businesses often bootstrap, use contractors, and require entrepreneurs to acquire diverse skills. They offer a favorable risk-reward tradeoff, allowing founders to retain control and start paying themselves earlier. Investors and corporations find them attractive for their innovation and substantial returns. But to support mighty-middle startups, tailored support is required, emphasizing mentorship and showcasing successful mighty- middle examples.
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S26Is fundamental science a victim of its own success? Some 500 years ago, there was one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. The Sun rose in the east and set in the west with a regular, 24 hour period. Its path in the sky rose higher and the days grew longer until the summer solstice, while its path was the lowest and shortest on the winter solstice. The stars exhibited that same 24 hour period, as though the heavenly canopy rotated throughout the night. The Moon migrated night-to-night relative to the other objects by about 12° as it changed its phases, while the planets wandered according to the geocentric rules of Ptolemy and, later, refinements put forth by others.
For over 1000 years, this Earth-centered view of our Universe went largely unchallenged, and became nearly universally accepted.
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S27Family stricken with rare brain worms after eating undercooked bear In the summer of 2022, a family gathered in South Dakota for a reunion that included a special meal—kabobs made with the meat of a black bear that one of the family members had "harvested" from northern Saskatchewan, Canada, that May. Lacking a meat thermometer, the family assessed the doneness of the dark-colored meat by eye. At first, they accidentally served it rare, which a few family members noticed before a decision was made to recook it. The rest of the reunion was unremarkable, and the family members departed to their homes in Arizona, Minnesota, and South Dakota.
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S28S29What Monastic Mystics Got Right About Life Want to stay current with Arthur's writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
An old saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain runs, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Misinformationâor what some call "fake news"âis clearly a huge problem in our society, leading to a great deal of conflict. But this principle is, from my observation, also the biggest obstacle facing every young adult starting out on a new life after college graduation. Focusing on all the things you don't know yet is easy. The greater problem is everything the world has told you about your future that simply isn't true.
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S30Russia's Psychological Warfare Against Ukraine "There is a battle going on between two worldviews, but the divisions aren't geographical. They're in people's heads."
After months of struggle with little movement, the war in Ukraine may be nearing a crucial point. The fight has not been going well for Ukraine. With American aid stalled, tired fighters on the front lines faced ammunition shortages just as Russia brought new sources of recruits and weapons online.
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S31Cows Have Almost Certainly Infected More Than Two People With Bird Flu It was bound to happen again. For the second time in two months, the United States has confirmed a case of bird flu in a dairy worker employed by a farm with H5N1-infected cows. "The only thing I'm surprised about is that it's taken this long to get another confirmed case," Steve Valeika, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist based in North Carolina, told me.
The true case count is almost certainly higher. For weeks, anecdotal reports of sick farmworkers have been trickling in from around the nation, where H5N1 has been detected in dozens of herds in nine states, according to federal counts. Testing among humans and animals remains limited, and buy-in from farms is still spotty. The gap between reality and what the government can measure is hindering the world from realizing the full scope of the outbreak. And it may hamper experts' ability to detect human-to-human spread, should that someday occur. "I wouldn't be surprised if there have been dozens of cases at this point," Valeika said.
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S32S33S34What Happens in the Brain to Cause Depression? | Quanta Magazine For decades, the best drug therapies for treating depression, like SSRIs, have been based on the idea that depressed brains don't have enough of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Yet for almost as long, it's been clear that simplistic theory is wrong. Recent research into the true causes of depression is finding clues in other neurotransmitters and the realization that the brain is much more adaptable than scientists once imagined. Treatments for depression are being reinvented by drugs like ketamine that can help regrow synapses, which can in turn restore the right brain chemistry and improve whole body health.
In this episode, John Krystal, a neuropharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine, shares the new findings in mental health research that are revolutionizing psychiatric medication.
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S35The S-Matrix Is the Oracle Physicists Turn To in Times of Crisis | Quanta Magazine Even without knowing exactly what goes on during a particle collision, the "S-matrix" lets physicists assess the possible outcomes.
In 1943, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg distracted himself from World War II by pondering a crisis in quantum theory. Predictions about how particles should behave were occasionally giving nonsensical, infinite results. These infinities led Heisenberg to distrust the way quantum physics was depicting reality, and to expect that a revolutionary new theory would eventually overthrow particle physics and fix the problem. But even with no such theory at hand, he realized, progress could still continue. The key was to focus on unassailable facts that would survive no matter what new theory might arise in the future.
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