Ideas are powerful. Arriving at the right time, they can alter the entire direction of your life. But ideas also hide in the background, acting as assumptions. Quietly influencing your decisions, whether they’re true or false. Looking back, I can think of a number of ideas that shaped my life. Some are only obvious in […]

Recently, I’ve had an interest in learning more biology. Some of that curiosity is pandemic-inspired. Biology is playing an outsized role in all of our lives these days. Yet much of the interest predates our current crisis. As a teenager, I really enjoyed books like The Selfish Gene and The Red Queen. Evolutionary biology revealing […]

Recently, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from students asking the right way to take notes. As I’ve been answering them, I realized that the question of note-taking neatly encapsulates a lot of deeper thinking about the right way to learn things. Instead of explaining how to take notes, then, I’d like to explain how […]

A reader emailed me about a difficult exam he was facing. The test was for a prestigious civil service job in his country. Get one of those jobs, and you’re set for life. Unfortunately, competition was also steep. About four hundred people compete, and only the best scorer on the test gets the spot. Applicants […]