In 2026 – up until July – Elon Musk’s estimated wealth was growing by somewhere between US$30 million and $100 million an hour, making him, at least briefly, the worlds’ first trillionaire. By comparison, the typical American worker earns between $23 and $56 an hour. While Musk’s wealth, even in the face of recent losses,...
New international psychology study finds we frequently don’t spot who is missing in our daily lives During a staff meeting we may look around to take account of who is present—an observation that could consider the race or gender of who is in the room. But would everyone notice a complete absence of women, colleagues...
There’s a strange problem facing anyone trying to write fiction today: reality keeps getting there first. Wars unfold live on our phones. Political figures feel less like leaders and more like characters written for maximum attention. Events that would have once been dismissed as too on-the-nose or implausible now pass as ordinary headlines. It’s not...
Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds − when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one. The Trump administration’s miscalculation of Iran is not an anomaly. It is the...
I had been with my boyfriend, Tyler, for almost 10 years when we finally agreed that we should get engaged and married. Up until then, our respective jobs – mine as an academic, his as a fisherman – had forced us to endure long stretches apart. But I had been offered a permanent academic job...
Colonialism has been a central part of history around the world, differing only in form over time and space. After all, whenever people have moved from one place to another, they have colonised spaces and other people or forms of life. In Africa, colonialism has mostly been studied as something imposed from outside, for example...
“Humble” is not a word my colleagues would use to describe me, especially early in my career. In fact, when word got around that I was researching humility, I suspect more than a few choked on their coffee. And even though I have spent over a decade exploring the concept as an attribute and as...
A new study in Public Opinion Quarterly shows that moral arguments appealing to care and fairness can persuade both liberals and conservatives in the United States. By contrast, arguments grounded in the “binding” moral foundations – loyalty, authority and sanctity – primarily influence conservatives. In the study, conducted by researchers at Stockholm University, Mälardalen University, and the...
Obituaries preserve what families most want remembered about the people they cherish most. Across time, they also reveal the values each era chose to honor. In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we analyzed 38 million obituaries of Americans published from 1998 to 2024. We identified the values...
When Napoleon embarked upon a military expedition into Egypt in 1798, he brought with him a team of scholars, scientists and artists. Together, they produced the monumental “Description de l’Égypte,” a massive, multivolume work about Egyptian geography, history and culture. At the time, the United States was a young nation with big aspirations, and Americans...