The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive
n 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side.
The Sugar Conspiracy
Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times...
The Data or The Hunch
JOHN HAMMOND WAS a boy of ten when he fell in love with the new music called jazz. Rather than heading home after school to his family’s mansion on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, he would jump on an uptown bus and deposit himself, 30 blocks...
How the Mad Men Lost the Plot
The arrival of Facebook and Twitter appeared to threaten the advertising industry’s very existence. So what happened next? Even admen have souls, and some of them are enduring dark nights. Jeff Goodby is co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein &...
The Revolution That Could Change the Way Your Child is Taught
The video does not seem remarkable on first viewing. A title informs us that we are watching Ashley Hinton, a teacher at Vailsburg Elementary, a school in Newark, New Jersey. Hinton, a blonde woman in a colourful silk scarf, stands before a class...
Why the Mona Lisa Stands Out
IN 1993 A PSYCHOLOGIST, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically...
How mistakes can save lives: one man’s mission to revolutionise the NHS
Martin Bromiley is a modest man with an immodest ambition: to change the way medicine is practised in the UK. I first met him in a Birmingham hotel, at a meeting of the Clinical Human Factors Group, or CHFG. Hospital chief executives, senior...
42 Reflections On the Meaning of Life
I was counting on my 42nd birthday to enlighten me about life, the universe and everything. Or anything. But until that happens, this is all I’ve got. People say age is just a number, and I suppose that’s true, but it’s a number that tells you...
Malcolm Gladwell Is Underrated
I know – it’s like proposing The Beatles are underrated. Malcolm Gladwell is the king of non-fiction writing and publishing. His new book is a million-seller lock. His writing is referenced hundreds of times a day in newspapers, magazine...
Ambivalence Is Awesome
Tell me your position on the NSA government surveillance revelations. Do you believe that Edward Snowden is a quiet hero who has performed a vital public service? Or do you think he is a traitor who broke the most solemn of oaths? You may have...
In Search of Serendipity
ONE DAY IN 1945, a man named Percy Spencer was touring one of the laboratories he managed at Raytheon in Waltham, Massachusetts, a supplier of radar technology to the Allied forces. He was standing by a magnetron, a vacuum tube which generates...