Whether your dad is navigating the joys of parenthood, seeking fresh adventures, or simply loves learning something new, these six nonfiction books offer insight, wisdom, and plenty of memorable stories. From the science of fatherhood to the pursuit of mastery and the call of the wild, each one is a gift for curious dads everywhere.

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Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives

By

A groundbreaking exploration of the science and significance of fatherhood that shows great dads are made, not born. Stay tuned for our Book Bite summary, read by author Darby Saxbe, or view on Amazon.

The Running Ground: A Father, a Son, and the Simplest of Sports

By

Running has the capacity to show us what we’re made of and help us grow beyond our limits—both as we race ahead on the track and in life. Struggle, aging, and even trauma can become engines of transformation if we learn how best to keep moving forward. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Nicholas Thompson, or view on Amazon.

Gnar Country: Growing Old, Staying Rad

By Steven Kotler

Cutting-edge discoveries in embodied cognition, flow science, and network neuroscience have revolutionized how we think about peak performance aging. On paper, these discoveries should allow older athletes to progress in supposedly “impossible” activities. To see if theory worked in practice, Kotler conducted his own ass-on-the-line experiment in applied neuroscience and later-in-life skill acquisition. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author Steven Kotler, or view on Amazon.

Father Nature: The Science of Paternal Potential

By James Rilling

A neuroscientist, who is a father himself, explains the evolution of human fatherhood: from the divergence of our species from the great apes to our modern world of changing paternal expectations. Father Nature is the story of what men can expect when they’re expecting. Listen to our Book Bite summary, read by author James Rilling, or view on Amazon.

Read on for the rest of the list…

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Everyone loves a good rallying cry: go all-out, go hard, go big or go home. But the best athletes know something the slogans don't: you have to save something for the second half. While this wisdom may be widespread in sports, it’s somewhat less common in business and relationships. This week, we learned that the art of pacing can pay off in just about every aspect of your life.

Father’s Day is this Sunday! Give dad one of our best-of three-book bundles.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Is the FIFA World Cup really worth it?

The World Cup is in full swing, and so far the mood is meh. Fans are fuming over sell-your-kidney ticket prices, frightened by reports that ICE may target matches, tailgates, and sports bars, and generally feeling down on this quadrennial celebration.

We wanted to know: Is there any joy left in this thing?

So we called up Simon Kuper. He’s a columnist at the Financial Times, “one of the best sportswriters in the English language today” (The New Yorker), and author of the Next Big Idea Club must-read World Cup Fever. He’s also attended every World Cup since 1990.

Simon tells us how the tournament bridges political divides, why suicides decline during the World Cup, whether “sportswashing” really works, and which storylines to follow, no matter if you’re a die-hard footy fan or a first-time viewer. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

What’s the future of marriage?

Marriage and gender relationships have never been fixed or “natural” in one permanent form. Throughout history, they have changed dramatically, and understanding that evolution can help us build better relationships today.

Stephanie Coontz is the director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. She has authored several books on gender, family, and history, including Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, which was cited in the United States Supreme Court decision on marriage equality. Her new book is For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. Check out her key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. Most of us learned about natural selection in school—and never thought about it again. Jones shows how evolutionary thinking can improve medicine, AI, economics, law, and more, drawing on surprising examples from cancer treatment to geckos to archerfish. Nature’s deepest logic, it turns out, has a lot to teach us. Praised by Steven Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, and Jerry Coyne.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What’s your hurry?

What if the real secret to thriving isn’t pushing harder—it’s learning when to push, when to ease off, and when to recover? Science writer shares big ideas from her new book, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving, a practical antidote to the “all gas, no brakes” culture of modern work and life. Pick up a copy of her book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a (Happy) Skeptic: The Power of Doubt in a Meaningful Life--Lessons from Cicero’s Philosophy

Sarah Wilson, I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World

Luke Burgis, The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion

Samuel Moyn, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth―and What to Do About It

Elizabeth Svoboda, The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving

Rowan Jacobsen, In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure

Steve Kamb, How to Try Again: An Approachable Guide to Navigating Chaos and Making Change That Sticks

Elizabeth Dunn & Jiaying Zhao, Leave the Lights On: How Joyful Decisions Can Save Our Species

The Big Idea: AI is only working for you as long as you’re still doing the thinking. The moment you outsource judgment, creativity, and the hard stuff, the dynamic quietly flips.

Why It Matters: As AI becomes more capable and more convenient, the pressure to hand over more — at work, at home, with your kids — keeps growing. The line between useful tool and quiet replacement is easier to cross than most people realize.

Try This Today: Next time you reach for AI to draft, decide, or problem-solve, try sketching your own rough answer first — even badly, even on paper. Then see what the AI adds, rather than what it replaces.

These ideas come from I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything by . Joanna is an Emmy-winning tech journalist, founder of New Things, and NBC News’ chief tech analyst, who spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

Father’s Day is this weekend! Give dad one of our best-of three-book bundles.

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1. Work with AI, not for it.

The moment you outsource all the hard work—the work that actually makes you think—the AI isn’t working for you, you’re working for it. I saw this firsthand when I went back to my college to observe classes and saw how many students were using AI to summarize readings and write papers. Some told me they didn’t think they were thinking anymore, and they felt the results of it.

Use AI to move faster, spark ideas, and automate the boring parts. But keep your weird, wonderful human judgment in the loop. Your job will likely require you to work alongside AI. Find the rhythm with your new machine coworker. But the moment you let it do most of the thinking for you, the atrophy begins, and you lose control.

Step away from the bot. Do the hard work—sketch the outline, wrestle with the idea—maybe even using paper and a pen, like some prehistoric creature. As the great coach Jimmy Dugan (played by Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own said: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard . . . is what makes it great.”

2. Don’t fall in love with a bot.

Trust me on this one. Those charming AI friends and lovers know exactly what to say, and they feel eerily real. A coach or companion to talk you through rough days? Fine. But set boundaries—and remember what these “relationships” really are. A connection with a machine isn’t a substitute for messy, inconvenient, irreplaceable human intimacy. AI is a mirror. Don’t mistake it for more. And please do not have sex with your smartphone. Or laptop. Or desktop. Or expensive monitor.

“AI is a mirror. Don’t mistake it for more.”

At the first sign of deeper feelings for your chatbot, tweak the settings to make it less enticing. Or just throw your phone or computer in the nearest body of water.

3. Think about who is watching.

These tools don’t get smarter without your data—lots of it.

As they become more powerful—and more helpful—we’ll keep handing over more. And more companies will pitch the idea that the convenience and cutting-edge of what they offer are worth the privacy trade-off. No one said it more clearly than Bernt Børnich, the maker of the 1X Neo robot, when I interviewed him. He said: “Depending on how much you want to trade, we can be more useful and you decide where on that scale you want to be.” If you don’t want your life to become part of the next training dataset, then don’t do it. You have control over what you do and don’t use.

Tweak your data collection settings and understand what companies expect in return for all that new convenience, personalization, and intelligence.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. Most of us learned about natural selection in school—and never thought about it again. Jones shows how evolutionary thinking can improve medicine, AI, economics, law, and more, drawing on surprising examples from cancer treatment to geckos to archerfish. Nature’s deepest logic, it turns out, has a lot to teach us. Praised by Steven Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, and Jerry Coyne.

4. Raise humans, not robots.

Our kids need to learn how to use AI, but they also need the very things that make them human: struggle, hard work, boredom, imagination, heartbreak. Teach them to think. Teach them to fail. Teach them to build forts out of couch cushions instead of metaverses in some vibe coding app.

My kids learned a lot about AI from my year. One of my favorite stories in the book is when my son asks ChatGPT why his praying mantis is browning. ChatGPT says the mantis is pregnant. The mantis wasn’t pregnant. It died a few days later. RIP, Mantis. But it was a valuable lesson. It taught my son to question every answer.

“Show your kids how these tools work and how you challenge them.”

No companionship chatbots until at least age sixteen. Or maybe ever. And whatever you do, don’t give them an AI-powered stuffed animal at any age.

Show your kids how these tools work and how you challenge them. Say out loud when an answer is wrong. Ask, “Does this make sense?” Point out flaws and biases. The goal isn’t just digital literacy; it’s digital skepticism.

5. Keep building your own training data.

Your life, your memories, your weird childhood stories—that’s your training data. It’s what makes you you. It’s where your creativity, your relationships, and your oddly specific opinions about how to load the toilet paper roll come from. Machines can generate content like music, images, and bedtime stories. But only you can generate meaning within those.

You don’t get rich human training data from sitting inside all day talking to a chatbot. Or even sitting outside talking to a chatbot. Make dinner without ChatGPT’s recipe. Read a real book made of real paper. Yell at your real dog. Touch real grass mowed by real people.

Keep a notebook where you jot down weird ideas, dreams, and half-baked thoughts. Let it be messy. That’s your real-time, human dataset—and no one else can train on it but you.

Do all the things robots can’t. Be unpredictable. Be present. Be human.

The Big Idea: The 100-year life is no longer a fantasy — it’s a fast-approaching reality. And 75% of how well you live it is up to you, not your genes.

Why It Matters: Most of our institutions — retirement systems, workplace structures, healthcare models — were built for lives that ended decades earlier. The gap between how long we’re living and how prepared we are to live that long is widening fast.

Try This Today: Check whether you hit 150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise this week. That’s the research-backed minimum for healthy longevity. If not, schedule it like an appointment.

These ideas come from Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives by Michael Clinton. Michael is the former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines and a leading voice on longevity through his company ROAR Forward. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

Father’s Day is coming up! Give dad one of our best-of three-book bundles.

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1. The new longevity era is here.

100 years ago in the US, life expectancy was 62 years old. In Europe, it was less than 60 years old, and in many Asian countries, it was less than 50 years old. Due to the developments of vaccines and antibiotics, cleaner water, a better food supply, and waste disposal. We’ve seen more growth in life expectancy since the early 20th century than at any time in all of history combined. Today in the US, the average life expectancy hovers around 80, and it is higher in many European and Asian countries. Women, who generally live five to six years longer than men, are approaching life expectancies in the mid to late 80s in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea.

Life expectancies of mid to late 80s in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, and it is anticipated that in a few years, women in those countries will exceed 90 years old as life expectancy in those countries continues to grow. Across the globe, living longer is becoming the human experience and will continue to grow in the years to come. As part of the new longevity, it is projected that we will also begin to see the normalization of the 100-year life. Today, there are about 770,000 centenarians worldwide, and the UN projects that by 2100, there will be over 25 million people aged 100 or older. Multiple studies also project that today’s five-year-old, assuming good healthcare, will have a 50 percent chance of living to 100. While it is all an exciting prospect, it has huge implications for the world at large.

All of our institutions and structures will have to adapt to this phenomenon. Governments and businesses will have to rethink how to accommodate this massive demographic expansion. Healthcare and social support systems will need to be available to everyone, as will ways to ensure financial security for longer lives. It is all the opportunity and the challenge of a new longevity.

2. New medical breakthroughs enabled by AI and technology will manifest the 100-year life.

We’re in a new golden age of medicine and diagnostics that will lead to new approaches to preventive healthcare, allowing us to identify issues early, get on a path to early treatment, and extend lives. Measurements from wearables and other longevity technologies will track our core health metrics in new, more comprehensive ways. New types of medical and biomarker tests, along with a focus on genomics and data, all enabled by AI, will lead to the advent of precision medicine for the individual. The ability to compare an individual’s cancer with millions of data points from others at the same age and stage will lead to a personalized subset of therapeutics for treatment. Drug development, such as GLP-1s, Metformin, Farxiga, and others, is showing promise of leading to a delay in aging for human beings.

“The longevity innovators in science, medicine, and technology are ushering in a new era of human possibility.”

Ozempic and Mounjaro, two GLP-1 drugs, not only treat obesity but also show promise as longevity drugs, as they reduce inflammation and improve cardiovascular outcomes and organ function. We’re only at the beginning of new drug discoveries being developed for longer, healthier lives. There are also several moonshot projects underway to develop a vaccine to slow the aging process at the cellular level.

According to Rajon Naj at Stanford, in the future, we won’t do drug trials anymore, but go right to AI-proven drug solutions. AI-driven approaches will also help identify the root causes of aging itself, slowing down cardiovascular disease and neurodegeneration. Today, there are already two FDA-approved disease-modifying drugs for Alzheimer’s to slow down cognitive decline in people with early symptoms. There’s also a robust pipeline of about 140 drugs in various stages of development that we fast-tracked with artificial intelligence.

The longevity innovators in science, medicine, and technology are ushering in a new era of human possibility. While no individual has lived longer than 122 years, the belief is that we will break through that barrier. Dr. David Sinclair at Harvard and others already believe that the first person to live to 150 years has been born.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. Most of us learned about natural selection in school—and never thought about it again. Jones shows how evolutionary thinking can improve medicine, AI, economics, law, and more, drawing on surprising examples from cancer treatment to geckos to archerfish. Nature's deepest logic, it turns out, has a lot to teach us. Praised by Steven Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, and Jerry Coyne.

3. In the new longevity era, we will live in new and inventive ways to support our longer lives.

Around the world, more and more older people will outnumber younger people. Due to declining birth rates in over 150 countries, the shift to older people continues to grow. By the early 2030s, there will be more people aged 65 and older in the US than those under 18, and the same will be true in other countries. Governments across the globe, including states, cities, and communities, will need to rethink urban planning, infrastructure, transportation, housing, and social services to accommodate the needs of this changing citizenry. A beacon of inspiration is the nation-state of Singapore, which has already begun to address this shift. From designing public housing to be more age-inclusive, to incorporating universal design into multi-generational flats called the 3G flat, the $3 billion action plan for successful aging is in full swing.

Places like Fujisawa in Japan are being redesigned as age-friendly cities, as are projects such as the City of Longevity in Newcastle, UK, and the new Longevi-city in Ras Al-Kama, United Arab Emirates, which will include cutting-edge advances in healthcare, technology, and community development to promote longer, healthier lives. The World Health Organization’s global network for age-friendly cities was established in 2010 to help leaders adapt to their aging populations. As of date, over 1,600 cities and communities from 52 countries are engaged in sharing best practices.

In the US, the Age Inclusive American Cities Guidebook is a new initiative that explores how states and cities can incentivize businesses to partner in age-friendly initiatives and how city planners, architects, zoning officials, and others can join the movement. Developers and real estate executives are also forming alliances to address new ways of living that will enhance the aging in place trend and to establish multi-generational housing and communities that integrate older and younger people in natural living environments.

“We are just beginning to create new ways to live as dynamic older people.”

Ghettoizing older people in nursing homes across more than 55 communities will become outdated models for living as technology and new kinds of communities, such as Mirabella at Arizona State University and Urban Ear, continue to grow and promote healthier intergenerational living.

With the expansion of smart homes enabled by AI technology and advances in telemedicine, many individuals will also be able to track their health metrics, connect them directly to their physicians, find solutions to isolation and loneliness through robotic companions, and be more mobile with exoskeleton devices. We are just beginning to create new ways to live as dynamic older people.

4. The redefinition of the workplace and the reframing of retirement.

If someone is 65 and healthy, they may live another 30 or more years. It should prompt a complete rethink of what was once viewed as the traditional retirement, a construct created in the early 20th century when life expectancies were shorter. Today, people need to work longer or work in new ways to maintain financial security for a 100-year life. The workplace model of the 20th century is no longer relevant in the new longevity era. Instead of thinking about moving people out in their 60s, companies need to restructure and explore ways to retain, retrain, and promote older talent, tapping into their experience and wisdom to sustain productivity.

A great example of a workplace innovator is L’Oréal, the global beauty company. Its initiative, L’Oréal for All Generations, is designed to keep employees in place well into their 60s and beyond, recognizing that 65 is no longer the number to end a career. With an additional 30 years of life, individuals may not want to work in the same profession or in the same way. New work approaches include the portfolio life, returnships, and fractional roles, all part of the future work models of the new longevity era. While some of this is in response to the need to earn money to fund a longer life, it also reflects the importance of purpose and engagement, an important element for a longer human life. This is leading to a growing trend of entrepreneurship among older people who launch businesses in their 50s, 60s, and later.

Data from the Kaufman Foundation showed that more than 25 percent of new entrepreneurs were between the ages of 55 and 64, a substantial increase from about 15 percent in 1996. The future of work will continue to evolve in the new longevity era. With longer lives, the 60-year career will become a new reality, but it will look very different from what has existed in the past.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. They’ve been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree

5. You have more control over your personal longevity than you might think.

While new studies continually report findings, the scientific and medical communities are in unison that genetics account for about 25 percent of our individual longevity. There are some exceptions, with certain ethnic groups that may have what is called the longevity gene, but that is rare. Dr. Nir Barzola at Einstein College of Medicine in New York has studied Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians since the mid-1990s, who are a great example of one of these unique population groups. But with 75% of our longevity in our control, how can we put ourselves on a path to a long and healthy life, regardless of what number we reach? I personally am going for 100. A whole industry has developed to promise ways to ensure our longevity, whether through supplements, peptides, NAD+ replenishment, and more.

“The number one focus for healthy longevity is the consistent need for movement and exercise.”

Yet there are still some very fundamental longevity hacks that have proven to be tried and true. The number one focus for healthy longevity is the consistent need for movement and exercise. As Dr. Mark Lacks from New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine says, “Motion is lotion.” Regardless of your preferred exercise, a minimum of 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic exercise, including two days of resistance training for at least 30 minutes, is the right minimum. As Dr. Michel Frederickson at Stanford University says, “We should do this from the age of 18 until our last day on earth.” Combine that with what some call conscious consumption, a diet focused on plant-based foods packed with protein from beans, legumes, tofu, eggs, fish, and more. Move away from processed foods, eat less, and be mindful of the levels of alcohol and sugar you consume.

Good sleep may be one of the hidden superpowers for a healthier life. A commitment to sleep hygiene practices provides us with important REM and deep sleep cycles aligned with our chronotype. Let’s do that again. Being well-rested has positive impacts on our mind, body, and spirit. The importance of purpose remains essential to the human condition. As we live longer, we need to be engaged and fulfilled, with commitments to ideas and actions that give us a sense of being connected to the world. That, along with lifelong healthy relationships with people of all ages in both our family and social circles, helps avoid isolation and loneliness, leading to stronger mental health, an important factor in our healthy lifespan.

While there are many other longevity hacks, it is ultimately our responsibility to put ourselves on a path that makes us longevity-ready. Augmented by new medical developments and medicines, all fueled by AI and technology, the healthy 100-year life is a real possibility. The question is, will you be ready?

The Big Idea: Long-term thriving isn’t about working harder or stepping back entirely. It’s about learning to pace yourself, the way athletes do, by managing energy deliberately instead of swinging between burnout and withdrawal.

Why It Matters: Most advice about productivity assumes more structure is always better. But rigid schedules break the moment life intervenes, leaving many people stuck between all-out effort and total burnout.

Try This Today: Notice when your energy naturally peaks today, and schedule your hardest task for that window tomorrw, instead of whenever it’s “supposed” to happen.

These ideas come from The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving by . Elizabeth is an award-winning science writer and contributor to Scientific American, Psychology Today, and the Boston Globe. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. Pacing is a learnable skill that’s integral to thriving.

The concept of smart pacing isn’t really on our cultural radar; it’s mostly siloed off in the world of athletics. As one business leader told me, “We don’t learn how to pace ourselves. There’s not a class on that.”

The result is that many of us end up defaulting to pacing extremes, in part because the cultural messages we’re hearing are also extreme: Either we ought to “go 110 percent” or “lean in,” or at the other extreme, “lie flat” or “quiet quit.” But for most of us, these extreme options are falling short. Going all-out leads to a predictable crash, while prolonged withdrawal—while relaxing and sometimes necessary—doesn’t give us the sense of contribution that studies show is key to lasting fulfillment.

What top athletes and coaches understand is how to range across the broader middle of the pacing spectrum, an overlooked zone that fuels long-term thriving. Distance runners learn to manage their energy in sophisticated ways, say, by deliberately putting forth 50 or 75 percent effort at certain points in a race to carry out their larger pacing plan.

Like these athletes, we can learn to pace ourselves in more incremental, nuanced ways, allowing us to make progress on what matters most without sacrificing our health and well-being.

2. Make pace shifts before burnout hits.

Many of us are reactive in how we manage our energy stores. We keep going well beyond our limits at work or in the community, taking on too much until we crash physically or mentally and need to take time to recover. Then, once we deem ourselves functional enough, the cycle begins all over again.

But this approach takes a greater toll on our health and long-term reserves than we realize. By the time you reach a burnout state—where you have zero energy or motivation and your stress levels are through the roof—it can take weeks, months, or even years to recover. In one study of about 200 people treated for “stress-related exhaustion,” more than a third were still clinically exhausted seven years after their treatment, and only around 16 percent made a full recovery.

If you want to thrive in the long run, it’s much better to pull yourself back from the brink of total exhaustion than to fall all the way in. That’s why shrewd pacing approaches are more proactive than reactive. They involve making meaningful shifts in the cadence of your workdays, the depth of your recovery practices, and the length of your breaks long before you reach burnout’s bleeding edge.

3. Energy management trumps time management.

If you’ve spent any time in the corporate world, you’re no doubt familiar with the gospel of time management. It involves charting your days in detail and often dedicating half-hour or hour-long chunks to specific tasks to ensure no time is wasted. But while this kind of time management can make you feel on top of things, it’s also fundamentally brittle. The moment an interruption happens, or a meeting runs long, you must start over. And the more times you fail at granular time management, the more likely you may be to give up on adding meaningful structure to your day.

Energy management is a more intuitive and sustainable way of planning your day. It means working with your body and mind’s natural rhythms as much as possible. You observe when you normally have the most energy—mid-morning, afternoon, or evening—and you do your most important and mentally demanding work during those times.

The Olympian and middle-distance runner Ajée Wilson has become an expert at structuring her day around her energetic highs and lows. While preparing for a big meet, she does one intensive two-hour practice session starting in mid-morning, when she’s at her strongest and most focused. Afterward, she takes a long midday rest to compensate for the intensity of that morning workout. In the same way, you can plan stretches of deep focus during your own peak energy windows, then tackle less intense work like routine email or data entry during energy lulls.

Of course, your day may include certain non-negotiable commitments: all-team meetings, interviews, presentations, and the like. But when you adopt the overall pacing philosophy of riding your natural energy peaks rather than working against them, you’ll get more done while feeling like you’re putting in less effort.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. Most of us learned about natural selection in school—and never thought about it again. But what if understanding how it actually works could help solve some of today’s biggest challenges? Jones shows how evolutionary thinking can improve medicine, artificial intelligence, economics, law, and more. Drawing on surprising examples from cancer treatment and space exploration to geckos and archerfish, he reveals how nature’s deepest logic can inspire smarter technologies, wiser policies, and a better future. Praised by Steven Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, and Jerry Coyne.

4. Brief, white-hot moments of connection fuel lifelong thriving.

Many of us want to be more generous. We may even have seen the research that links “generativity,” or social contribution, to long-term life satisfaction. However, we also tend to assume that meaningful generativity takes a Mother Teresa-scale commitment of time and effort.

The truth is that to reap the rewards of generativity, you often don’t need to reshuffle your calendar that much. What I call “brief candles”—significant encounters that unfold in just a few minutes—can change the lives of all involved in ways that reverberate for years or decades. Because their impact far outlasts their duration, they allow you to build a richly fulfilling life without exhausting your energy stores.

I talked to one family doctor who heard something alarming in a patient’s voice on the phone and invited her to pop into his office for a chat. During that brief conversation, he was able to dissuade her from pulling a gun on someone she was upset with at work. In a more everyday context, many people grow adept at offering crucial words of encouragement to friends and mentees, reminding them what they’re capable of when they’ve lost sight of it. Moments like these not only alter the course of recipients’ lives, but they also allow initiators to see the profound ways their influence matters.

The sense of mattering brief candles supply is energizing and motivating, making them integral to smart long-term pacing. And when you recognize the outsized impact of these moments, you can seek more opportunities to create them.

5. Skillful pacing is iterative and flexible.

Once you decide to pace yourself more deliberately, it’s tempting to optimize to the hilt—to map out a day-by-day pacing plan on ChatGPT, or to dictate the precise length of the breaks you’re going to take each day. But this kind of overly fixed planning often backfires. Thoughtful pacing calls for more fluidity and flexibility than a prefab plan can contain. It involves the engaged guess-and-check process scientists call “iteration”: trying out a pace shift, like adding or subtracting a commitment, for a few days or weeks; assessing the impact of that shift; then deciding how to proceed based on that assessment.

It makes sense to pace yourself toward long-term goals and set sub-goals you plan to accomplish each week or month—a strategy that studies show helps you achieve those goals without getting overwhelmed. But don’t be surprised if the finish line shifts somewhat as you gain perspective and experience.

Shrewd pacing plans also allow for on-the-fly adjustments. Many a racer has had to dial back their speed to bank their energy in a race’s middle stretches or speed up in the final few seconds to overtake another runner. Likewise, your plan should be adaptable enough to accommodate the unexpected: a family crisis or a project that drops into your lap at the last minute.

The crucial thing is to check in more frequently with yourself than you may be used to doing. Where are you now? Where do you want to end up? What adjustments could you make to get there with your health and sanity intact? Just as an athlete’s race day strategy evolves as they gather data, your pacing plan will evolve as you move forward. That’s not a mark of failure, but a sign that you’re bringing new knowledge and perceptions to bear in setting your own ideal pace.

The Big Idea: Great negotiators aren’t born. They’re trained. Like athletes or musicians, they improve by breaking the skill into small parts and practicing before the stakes are high.

Why It Matters: Negotiation shows up everywhere: salaries, relationships, chores, contracts, dinner plans. The better you get at understanding your own interests, reading other people’s, and using fair standards, the more likely you are to reach agreements that actually work.

Try This: Before your next ask, write down three things: what you want, why you want it, and what you’ll do if the answer is no.

These ideas come from Never Settle: Persuasion and Negotiation Skills to Get What You Want by John Richardson and . John teaches negotiation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and previously at Harvard Law; Attia is the founder of AQ Consulting and an adjunct at the Ford School of Public Policy. Read on for 5 of their big ideas.

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1. Reciprocity as a negotiation tool.

Reciprocity is a psychological phenomenon: when someone does something nice for someone else, the recipient feels an urge—almost a compulsion—to do something nice in return. This comes up a lot in hostage negotiation. If a bank robber has grabbed a few people hostage because the cops showed up before he could get away, the cops will wait until that guy gets hungry or thirsty and then offer to give him a sandwich or coffee on the condition that he let a hostage go. Almost always, they can get a hostage released in exchange for the most trivial, inconsequential gift.

How can you use that in negotiation? Start bringing people the equivalent of a sandwich. Let’s say you arrive early for a class or to a meeting and want to quickly grab a cup of coffee. Don’t get one—get two cups of coffee and give one to the person sitting next to you that day. Or look for other ways you can do little, nice things for others. We make this an assignment for our students.

One of our students told us a story. She was making traditional Japanese noodle soup when she remembered the assignment. She decided to make an extra-big batch and brought some across the hall to two guys who lived there, who were also graduate students at MIT. She wondered if they would do anything in return. About a week later, there was a big blizzard in Boston. She went out to the graduate student parking lot to shovel her car out from under the snow, but found that her car was already shoveled. There was a note on her windshield saying, “Thanks for that soup, it was delicious!”

Start looking for ways to do little, nice things for people, and then just watch and wait and see what happens. Very often, you’ll be surprised that you get something nice back in return. We’re often worried about making kind gestures because we’re afraid of being judged as weird or strange. But the people who receive those little gifts almost always think it’s wonderful.

You can also use this strategy to get something specific that you want. My wife is more sensitive to how clean the house is, so she’s often asking me to do things. She used to lounge next to me on the couch and ask me to take out the garbage, and I’d point out that she’s just sitting on the couch—same as I am—so she could just as well do it herself. But now, she will ask me if I can take out the garbage while she is taking care of a different chore, like the dishes. This puts me in a position where it is hard to say no because she is already busy, and the task she is doing helps me out, too. In feeling this debt of reciprocity, I feel the need to do something nice for her, so I take out the garbage. See if reciprocity works for you and your relationship.

2. The internal negotiation.

This is the negotiation most people forget to think about before they walk into the room. And it involves two components: emotions and interests.

Let’s start with emotions. We often experience feelings that can stop us before we even start a negotiation. Studies have found that 90 to 95 percent of our decision-making comes from unconscious emotional processing. We want to make sure that we are addressing negative emotions—like fear, anxiety, or uncertainty—beforehand and going in with positive, confident emotions. Managing those emotions before you walk into the room will stabilize you.

“Studies have found that 90 to 95 percent of our decision-making comes from unconscious emotional processing.”

To learn how to leave your negative emotions at the door, start now by thinking back to a negotiation you had in the past. What were you feeling beforehand? Write down all the feelings you can and get as specific as possible. Once you’ve written down the list, read it out loud and tell yourself that despite them, you will do great at your next negotiation. All of a sudden, the tone and temperature of those feelings will decrease, and you can assert control over those feelings. Rather than let them rule you, you can walk in with a sense of calm and confidence.

The second piece is your interests. Your interests are all the things that you care about in the negotiation, which is different than a position, which is rigid and inflexible. It’s almost like a demand that you are making. Think about a decision you have coming up. Maybe it’s to pick between two places to go on vacation, or you’re picking between two restaurants to go for dinner. Write down all your interests when it comes to that decision. Rank those interests from most important to least important, and then compare them to the decision that you’re trying to make and see what fits. Suddenly, you’ve thought through what it is you care about, and now the decision might become easier. People who identify their interests and have a very clear goal for what they want from a conversation are going to at least double their likelihood of success.

3. The power of understanding other people’s interests.

If you know what somebody else cares about—what they really want, what they’re afraid of—that allows you to craft an agreement that gives them more of what they really care about than they can get without you. This will get them to say yes to your proposal.

Figuring out other people’s interests takes practice. There are many situations when you can begin this kind of training. If you’re on a car ride with somebody or find yourself sitting next to someone at a cocktail party, ask them to tell you about a decision that they’re trying to make and see if you can guess their reasons for wanting to do it and the reasons for not wanting to do it. For example, I’m an EMT in the volunteer fire department. I was thinking about taking a class to become an advanced EMT. I would share my reasons for and against pursuing the training with others, then flip it back and ask them what they would do and what they think the pros and cons are. This will give you clues about what motivates that person and help you get into the practice of understanding what other people care about.

Typically, once you know what somebody else cares about, you like them a lot better. That’s why this is a great game to play on a first date. You not only get to know them better and figure out if they’re the right person for you, but they will also start to like you a lot more if you know what motivates them. That sets you up for the higher degree of difficulty version of this exercise.

Let’s say you’re already in a relationship, and you and your partner have an ongoing disagreement that keeps coming up. We suggest you try writing down everything that’s important to them in that decision and why they keep arguing about it. If you get their motivations right and they confirm that this is why they keep returning to this disagreement, they will often become more curious about your motivations and why you have yet to agree with them. Because if you prove that you do get it, then they start to think, there’s more to your thinking than they realize.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones, professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. Most of us learned about natural selection in school—and never thought about it again. But what if understanding how it actually works could help solve some of today’s biggest challenges? Jones shows how evolutionary thinking can improve medicine, artificial intelligence, economics, law, and more. Drawing on surprising examples from cancer treatment and space exploration to geckos and archerfish, he reveals how nature’s deepest logic can inspire smarter technologies, wiser policies, and a better future. Praised by Steven Pinker, Robert Sapolsky, and Jerry Coyne.

4. The sword and shield.

Most of us hate talking about the thing—usually money, but sometimes time or other resources. Ultimately, in a negotiation, we always have to get to that point of talking about the thing. Objective criteria can help.

Objective criteria are external standards or benchmarks that provide background and data on what is reasonable and fair in the negotiation. Let’s say that you are negotiating an upcoming salary. You can go into an LLM and type in what your role is, what the industry is, what your location is, give it as much context as possible, and ask for what the fair range for your salary. Make sure to vet it and check the data sources. Now you have a range to work with, such as between $100,000 to $125,000.

“Ultimately, in a negotiation, we always have to get to that point of talking about the thing.”

Objective criteria allow you to go into that conversation with a sword and shield. If you go up first, start with the sword. Put that stake in the sand and ask for the number you want because you have data to back you up. That data is your shield, so if they try to lowball you or push back on your request, you can easily counter. These pieces can help you bring money, time, or resources into the conversation in a way that’s fair and grounded in data. One thing to watch for is ensuring this standard is fair to all parties—that both sides can agree it’s reasonable.

Now, what is one way you can practice today? What is something that you can do? Let’s pick something small that you have going on. Maybe you have a contractor working in your house. You’ve been thinking about getting a new deck built. Go into that LLM and ask it what a reasonable price is for a wood deck of a certain square footage in your general area, and it will give you a range. Suddenly, you know pricing that is competitive for the marketplace.

You could do that with anything. You could do it with how much you should pay for an upcoming vacation. You could do it for how much you might want to spend on something at an artisan shop. It’s easy and quick to grab your phone and do some research. It will give you confidence to bring the thing up in the conversation and assert what is fair for you.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi

5. Alternatives let you know whether you should say yes or no.

By “alternatives,” we mean: what are you going to do if this negotiation doesn’t work? If you’re applying for a job, what if they don’t accept you? Then what other job will you apply for? Or might you stay at your current job? Is taking a year off to hike in the Himalayas an option?

Knowing what you will do if the negotiation doesn’t work allows you to compare their final and best offer to your alternatives. Every negotiation is a success in the sense that either you get something better than your alternative or you don’t take it. Alternatives also make you more comfortable with the possibility that they won’t agree with you. By not being overly worried about getting the answer you want, you won’t come off as desperate, which they will pick up on. If you are relaxed, they will pick up on that too and typically be more generous.

Knowing whether you should say yes or no and actually saying no when you should are two very different things. We’ve probably all agreed to things we knew we shouldn’t have said yes to, but it was uncomfortable, and you were worried about hurting the other person’s feelings. A lot of us are reluctant to say no, even when we know we should. We suggest looking for opportunities to say no in an especially cold and unfeeling way.

Someone asks you to go to the movies? No. Someone asks if you can help them move next Sunday? No. In real life, we usually don’t want to say no in a cold and unfeeling way, but it’s great practice. It’s like the way baseball players swing a heavier bat during practice so that when they’re at bat during the game, the normal-weight bat seems light and easy to swing.

In the same way, if you get used to saying no in a harsh, cruel way, then saying no in a kind, polite, and thoughtful way gets much easier. Now you probably want to do this either in relationships you don’t care about or in a relationship where the bond is secure enough to withstand a little and still be okay. Try this out and see if it gets easier to say no when you should.

It can feel like the forces of technology are moving faster than we can possibly steer them. But what happens if you stop bracing against the wave and actually lean in—wholeheartedly, eyes open? Sometimes, on the other side of that surrender, a strange optimism appears: the sense that beneath our flashiest tools, the deeper logic of human evolution is still the sturdier force, shaping what we build and how we adapt. This week, we explored that tension—and that hope—through a handful of new books.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

We may not be doomed after all.

Nearly half of all Americans believe AI is bad for humanity. is not one of them. On his podcast, Moonshots, and in his new book, We Are as Gods, co-written with the inimitable Steven Kotler, he makes the case that artificial intelligence is already ushering in a world of abundance — think radical life extension, 10 billion humanoid robots, and agents that do your job while you’re sipping a latte.

He knows it may not be all sunshine and hydroponic roses, but he believes our future is incredibly bright. And he’s putting his money where his mouth is: XPRIZE, the nonprofit he founded more than 30 years ago to bankroll breakthroughs, just announced it’s giving $3.5 million to filmmakers who conjure convincingly optimistic visions of the future.

Rufus and Caleb don’t have their film treatment ready yet, but they do have plenty of questions for Peter and Steven about flying cars, the future of work, worst-case scenarios, and the new commandments for working with AI. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Book Bite of the Week

What happens when AI does everything for you?

is an Emmy-winning tech journalist. She is the founder of New Things and NBC News’ chief tech analyst. She spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and was a technology editor at ABC News and The Verge. To write I Am Not a Robot, she spent a year letting AI and robots take over nearly every part of her life—or at least as much as she could without losing her mind, marriage, or job. She used it at work. She used it for her health. She used it for parenting. She used it for (almost) everything. Check out her key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Art of Pacing by Elizabeth Svoboda. Most of us are stuck between two extremes — endless hustle or complete disengagement — and neither works. Award-winning science writer Elizabeth Svoboda draws on cutting-edge research and interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs to reveal a third way: pacing. A refreshing antidote to hustle culture for anyone trying to work hard without burning out. Praised by Steve Magness, Carl Honoré, and Simone Stolzoff.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What’s evolution done for us lately?

Owen D. Jones is a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses, in part, on the implications of natural selection for everything from medicine to law to the way we make decisions. In his new book, Force of Nature, he argues that we are prone to make big, extremely consequential mistakes and miss important opportunities to improve the human condition anytime we overlook, underestimate, or misunderstand natural selection. Pick up a copy of his book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Owen D. Jones, Force of Nature: Understanding Evolution’s Deepest Logic―and Putting It to Use

Darby Saxbe, Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives

Rye Barcott, Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future

Amy Kurtz, But You Look Fine: Trapped in the Hell Between Sick and Well and How To Break Free

Fay Bound-Alberti, The Face: A Cultural History

Lu Chekowsky, Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self

John Kim, Love Hard On Purpose: Toss the Blueprints. Build Something Honest.

Chris Ballard, The Plunge: Maverick Swimmers, an Unlikely Quest, and the Transformative Power of Cold Water

Margie Lachman, Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife

Pamela Pavliscak, All the Feels: How to Stay Human in the Digital World

The Big Idea: Bravery and courage aren’t the same thing — and the difference matters more than most people realize. Bravery can be instinctive, even self-serving. Courage is a deliberate choice to serve something larger than yourself, especially when it costs you.

Why It Matters: In a political environment where simply being photographed with someone from the other party can become a liability, moral courage — the willingness to risk reputation and relationships for principle — is increasingly rare and increasingly necessary. The “outrage machine” punishes exactly the behavior that democracy depends on.

Try This Today: Think of one person you consistently disagree with politically. Reach out to that person, not to debate, but just to stay in relationship. That kind of small, deliberate act is the foundation of courage.

These ideas come from Courage Can Save Us: Ten Extraordinary Americans and the Fight for Our Future by Rye Barcott. Rye is a Marine veteran, social entrepreneur, and co-founder and CEO of With Honor, a cross-partisan organization that supports principled veteran leadership in public office. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. What’s the difference between bravery and courage?

Bravery, while a notable attribute, is different from courage. Bravery can be instinctive. It doesn’t necessarily require thinking; it can be reactive. In the military, we spend a lot of time training to be ready for intense moments when muscle memory can almost kick in. Bravery can also be self-serving.

Courage, on the other hand, is a decision. It’s a choice that weighs the risks in any situation and then chooses to serve something larger than oneself.

In the prologue of the book, I spend some time focused on the Stoics and Marcus Aurelius, who defined the common good as something that can serve many different things: a principle, your family, your community, or your country. Courage is always in service of something larger than oneself.

2. What’s the difference between physical courage and moral courage?

Oftentimes, acts of courage are almost hidden. They don’t necessarily reveal themselves.

Physical courage is the risking of the body. We often build monuments for this type of courage. I just finished an op-ed reflecting on the 82nd anniversary of D-Day and the iconic storming of the beaches to liberate Europe.

Moral courage, on the other hand, is a risk to reputation and friendships. Some believe it can be as deep as the soul. It pertains to one’s integrity, and oftentimes individuals find that this type of courage is harder to muster. Again, it is often quiet and hidden.

In this book, I surface such moments, particularly in the lives of public officials who served in the military and the FBI and then went on to the unforgiving environment of modern politics.

3. Why is bipartisan courage important?

Each of the individuals I cover in this book—five Republicans and five Democrats—often disagree with each other on matters of policy, but they treat each other with respect and dignity, and they have the courage to be bipartisan.

That doesn’t mean they bend to the other side’s ideas necessarily. Rather, it means they are willing to build those relationships, even when it’s very difficult to do so.

This is so important for the country and part of the motivation behind my book. These days, just being in a room with somebody from the other side can be weaponized and become a liability.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Art of Pacing by Elizabeth Svoboda. Most of us are stuck between two extremes — endless hustle or complete disengagement — and neither works. Award-winning science writer Elizabeth Svoboda draws on cutting-edge research and interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs to reveal a third way: pacing. A refreshing antidote to hustle culture for anyone trying to work hard without burning out. Praised by Steve Magness, Carl Honoré, and Simone Stolzoff.

4. How does today’s information environment affect political courage?

Someone once reflected that it’s the media’s problem. It’s larger than the media because many of the sources of influence and information for Americans today are not part of the establishment media.

In fact, many are individual podcasters and commentators who don’t necessarily have a standard of truth they need to meet. This has led to what one of the veterans profiled in the book refers to as the “outrage machine.”

This makes political courage more challenging because we often punish moments when people stand up against their own tribe or party. There are no easy solutions other than to seek the truth and, to the best of your ability, to always speak the truth.

5. How can courage and service help save us?

Courage means standing for what is right in pursuit of the common good. It is service, and service can save us. I believe that’s the case at an individual level, in large part because service gives you a way to focus on something larger than yourself.

This is a theme throughout the lives of each of the Americans profiled in this book. They’re not perfect. They’re flawed. But they are pursuing the common good and trying to do what’s right in a difficult time.

I hope that they inspire you.

The Big Idea: Your genes load the gun, but your habits pull the trigger — or don’t. Endocrinologist Florence Comite has spent three decades studying why some people age fast and others don’t, and her conclusion is counterintuitive: your DNA is less a sentence than a set of tendencies you can actively override.

Why It Matters: Most people treat aging as something that happens to them. But a growing body of research in epigenetics — how lifestyle shapes gene expression — shows that the gap between your lifespan and your healthspan isn’t fixed. The inputs you control, especially sleep, blood sugar, and muscle, turn out to be among the most powerful levers available.

Try This Today: At your next meal, eat protein and fiber first, before anything else on your plate. That will slow glucose absorption, reduce cravings, and start building the habit Florence calls the single most underrated longevity tool.

These ideas come from Invincible: Defy Your Genetic Destiny to Live Better, Longer by . Florence is an endocrinologist and clinician-scientist who founded the nation’s first health center exclusively for women at Yale and has spent 30 years studying healthspan and longevity. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Don’t blame your health on your parents.

A recent study suggests that more than 50 percent of your health and lifespan are influenced by the genes you inherited. I believe it’s much higher than that. However, your genes do not have to be your destiny.

You can change the expression of your genes—how they work, or what’s known as epigenetics—through the way you live. This includes what you eat, how you sleep, physical activity levels, and how you handle stress. You are much more in control of your health than you realize.

2. They don’t teach that in med school.

While celebrating my med school graduation, my father asked, “How do I keep myself healthy for the rest of my life?” And I couldn’t answer him because they only taught me how to diagnose symptoms and treat the main complaint.

“The answer can be found by looking at the cellular level.”

Medical schools don’t teach proactive prevention. My father’s question haunted me for years until I started realizing that the answer can be found by looking at the cellular level—early clues predicting the emergence of chronic disease. That’s the time to interpret and be proactive to stop disease progression.

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3. Family history isn’t the poor man’s DNA– it tells you even more.

Your health story is a summary of all the data that can help you and your physician accurately gauge your current health status and, more importantly, predict its trajectory and point toward possible interventions to change the course you’re on. But your health story is no CliffsNotes. It must be comprehensive to connect the dots and interpret what’s going on inside you. In my practice, a health story is made up of the following:

• Your medical history, lifestyle habits and environment.

• Your family’s history of health conditions.

• Key blood tests and data from wearables, like sleep trackers and continuous glucose monitors.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Art of Pacing by Elizabeth Svoboda. Most of us are stuck between two extremes — endless hustle or complete disengagement — and neither works. Award-winning science writer Elizabeth Svoboda draws on cutting-edge research and interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs to reveal a third way: pacing. A refreshing antidote to hustle culture for anyone trying to work hard without burning out. Praised by Steve Magness, Carl Honoré, and Simone Stolzoff.

4. If you do nothing else: track your sugars and sleep.

There was a time in my life when I was sleeping terribly, eating junk food, and totally stressed out by overwork. I was overweight, and my bloodwork indicated that I was at risk of diabetes. There I was, a precision medicine doctor, and I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong.

But then, by using an Apple Watch, Oura Ring sleep tracker, and an Abbott continuous glucose monitor, I uncovered the hidden part of my health story: My inadequate deep sleep triggered wild swings in my glucose, which caused cravings for quick-energy carbs and unhealthy foods. These three wearables taught me which lifestyle habits were sabotaging my health, and why. You don’t need a prescription for tools like these, and they can teach you how to turn your health around.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. They’ve been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree

5. Eat, muscle-up, sleep.

Here are three simple tips that you can use right now to rewrite your health story and, in time, reverse biological aging:

• Sleep like a bat. Not upside down, but in a cool, dark place. Turn the thermostat down to 65 degrees, black out your windows, set your devices aside, and stop eating at least two hours before bedtime. No nightcaps. Getting seven to eight hours of quality sleep every night is the most important habit you can adopt to keep your system (especially your brain) in peak health.

• Start every meal and snack with some protein and fiber. Both are filling, digest slowly, and will minimize the impact on your sugars. You’ll crave less and consume less.

• Start strength training. You need to get greedy when it comes to muscle. It’s the closest thing there is to a fountain of youth, and we lose it every year. Muscle is an organ of longevity, a repository for glucose that keeps it from spiking in your bloodstream. Resistance training with bands, weights, machines, or your own body weight is non-negotiable if you are serious about living well as you age.

The Big Idea: Natural selection isn’t a dusty concept from high school biology. It is a live force operating all around us, shaping bacteria in hospitals, pests in farm fields, tumors in bodies, technologies in labs, and even the decisions we make every day.

Why It Matters: When we misunderstand evolution, we make costly mistakes. We overuse antibiotics, breed stronger pests, misread risk, and design systems for minds we wish we had instead of the minds we actually inherited.

These ideas come from Force of Nature by Owen D. Jones. Jones is a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University whose research explores how natural selection shapes everything from medicine to law to decision-making. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Evolution is our present and our future—not just our past.

A few years ago, a woman from Nevada arrived at a hospital with what should have been a treatable infection. Her doctors reached for the first antibiotic. It didn’t work. Nor did the second. By the end, they had tried every one of the 26 antibiotics available in the United States. When none of them worked, the patient died—just as she would have in the days before antibiotic drugs even existed.

The bacteria that killed her weren’t exotic. They weren’t engineered in a lab. They had simply done what populations of organisms do every single day, all around us, and mostly without our noticing. They had evolved in reaction to selection pressures. The cost of misunderstanding how selection pressures work is far higher than most people realize.

Most of us learned about natural selection in high school biology class. We learned that when you have heritable traits, variation in those traits, and differential reproductive success, you have the ingredients necessary for natural selection as a process to yield evolution as a result. In other words, traits that work will spread through subsequent populations until they become typical of the species.

We learned in school that natural selection explains the relationship between species in the way plate tectonics explains the relationship between continents. We therefore thought it was mainly backward-looking and merely historical.

But the truth is, it’s not. Natural selection—as constant as gravity—is running right now, all around. It’s running in your gut, on your kitchen counter, in the oceans, in hospitals, and in farm fields. And its operations even influence the way your brain works and how your brain influences your decision-making.

Imagine it as a single, unsupervised factory that has been operating for three and a half billion years to produce every living thing on Earth: every redwood, every blue whale, every gut microbe, every one of us. That’s how relentlessly productive it is. And it doesn’t stop just because we think we’re smart.

If you want a single image of how fast a strong selection pressure can yield significant change, consider Chernobyl. After the 1986 nuclear reactor disaster, scientists entering the contamination zone found a fungus that wasn’t just surviving the radiation, it was thriving in it. In just five years, natural selection had adapted that fungus to do better in the presence of catastrophic radiation than without it. That’s evolution happening quickly on a human timescale.

Once you start seeing natural selection as a constant, omnipresent, and sometimes speedy force, almost everything else in modern life starts looking different. So let me show you four places where it’s already costing us, helping us, or quietly running the show.

2. Why “kill it all” keeps backfiring.

Start with that Nevada patient. When her doctors reached for those twenty-six antibiotics, they were doing exactly what we, as a culture, have been trained to do: fight infection by trying to wipe it out. Total annihilation. We kept trying to make that work, until it stopped working reliably.

Here’s the problem. Every time you use an antibiotic, you kill the bacteria that are easy to kill. You leave behind the ones that happened to have some resistance, and you hand those survivors the entire body-buffet. With plenty of food and now no competition, they multiply. Do that for a few decades, in individuals spread out across the globe, and you don’t just get superbugs. You make superbugs.

The same pattern shows up in farming. We invent a pesticide that kills 99 percent of a crop’s pests. We celebrate. The one percent that survives happens to be resistant, and once they have all bred for a few seasons, the whole population is resistant.

Importantly, the same pattern appears when treating certain types of cancer. We hit a tumor with the maximum tolerable dose of chemotherapy. We kill the cells that are easy to kill. The cells that survive are the ones most resistant to that treatment. They have no competitors left, so they reproduce and spread even more aggressively, often killing the patient in the process.

What’s the alternative? It’s not to give up. It’s to play a different game. There’s an oncologist named Robert Gatenby who’s been running clinical trials in prostate cancer using something called adaptive therapy. Instead of trying to kill every cancer cell, he treats the patient just enough to keep the tumor in check, then backs off—deliberately leaving some drug-sensitive cells alive so they can outcompete the resistant ones. In his trials, that approach roughly doubled the lifespan of the patients who received that therapy.

Farmers are doing a version of the same thing. In some regions, they now deliberately plant pesticide-free plots right next to fields treated with pesticides so that vulnerable pests survive and breed alongside resistant ones. Their offspring remain susceptible to the pesticide. Although this doesn’t eliminate the pests, it does keep them manageable.

Attempted eradication often breeds a stronger enemy than the one you’re trying to wipe out. Sometimes the smarter play isn’t total victory. It’s a managed truce.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is The Art of Pacing by Elizabeth Svoboda. Most of us are stuck between two extremes — endless hustle or complete disengagement — and neither works. Award-winning science writer Elizabeth Svoboda draws on cutting-edge research and interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs to reveal a third way: pacing. A refreshing antidote to hustle culture for anyone trying to work hard without burning out. Praised by Steve Magness, Carl Honoré, and Simone Stolzoff.

3. Nature is a 3.5-billion-year R&D lab, and the patents are free.

Let’s flip the camera around. Because the same force that breeds superbugs is also the most extraordinary inventor the planet has ever seen.

For three and a half billion years, evolution has been running the largest research and development experiments in history. Every organism alive today is, in a sense, a working prototype that passed billions of field tests. Engineers have started noticing that most of those breakthroughs and methods that made them are sitting in plain sight, waiting to be borrowed.

Let me give two examples—one mimicking a shape, and the other a method.

First is Japan’s bullet train, the Shinkansen. For years, it had a problem: every time it shot out of a tunnel, it produced a thunderclap. A member of the engineering team had been to a lecture on birds and noticed that kingfishers dive from the air into water with minimal splash because of the shape of their beaks. So, the nose of the train was redesigned to look like a kingfisher’s beak. The boom went away, the train ran faster, and it used less electricity.

The second example—instead of copying existing traits—harnesses the process of natural selection to solve a computationally difficult problem. In 2004, NASA needed a tiny antenna for one of its smaller satellites; a fiendishly tricky shape problem with dozens of competing constraints.

Human engineers specializing in antenna design tried, and the result didn’t meet the mission requirements. So, NASA handed the problem to specialists in a subfield of artificial intelligence known as evolutionary computation, which simulates natural selection inside a computer. They created two very rough parent programs for designing an antenna, and then bred them together, creating digital offspring that shared varying halves of each parent, and that also had some coding elements mutated from 0s to 1s, and vice versa.

The offspring programs that performed best became the parents of the next generation. And that cycle was run over and over and over. The end program coded for an antenna that looks like a bent paper clip a child made in a hurry. It looks wrong, with weird kinks and angles. But it outperformed the best human design. It’s the one NASA sent into space.

We tend to think of cutting-edge technology as something humans invent despite nature, high-tech versus the natural world. The truth is often closer to the opposite. The most exciting frontier in materials science, design, artificial intelligence, and medicine isn’t out-thinking nature. It’s reading her notebook to learn from her designs and to adapt her methods.

Three and a half billion years of R&D. The patents are free. And we’ve barely opened the file.

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4. Why smart people get risk so wrong.

In 1978, researchers asked a group of doctors and medical students at a leading medical school a question that should have been routine. They said: Imagine a disease that affects one person in a thousand. The test for it has a five percent false positive rate. Your patient just tested positive. What’s the chance they have the disease?

The right answer is around two percent. Yet almost half of these highly trained subjects gave the answer: 95 percent. They were off by a factor of nearly fifty! And these were not bad doctors.

For a long time, the conclusion people drew from this was: humans are bad at calculating conditional risks, so we need more statistics classes. But later researchers demonstrated that thinking was wrong. Or at least it’s not the whole story.

Here’s what appears to be going on instead. For roughly 99 percent of human history, our ancestors never encountered a percentage or a risk framed with a decimal or percent sign. What they encountered was people and things and events, in whole numbers—or what’s called the language of “natural frequencies.”

For example, 10 people went into that cave that smelled like bear, but only three people came out. This contrasts with the language of modern statistics, which would say that entering the cave carries a 0.7 risk of death. Our brains evolved to count individual things, not to manipulate decimals.

Take that exact same medical question and rephrase it: Imagine one thousand people. About one of them has the disease. Of the other 999 who don’t, about 50 will get a false positive on this test. Your patient just tested positive. What’s the chance they have the disease?

Suddenly, it’s obvious. Because if only one patient out of 51 patients who test positive will have the disease, then the chance that any one person testing positive has the disease is roughly two in 100, meaning about 2 percent.

One subsequent study showed that reframing statistics in terms of natural frequencies can boost doctors’ accuracy from 8 percent to 46 percent. Same problem. Same brains. Just a different format.

Our brains were built to count whole people or whole events, not percentages. When the stakes are high, ask people to translate risks into whole numbers, or even people. That one reframing can change a decision that changes a life.

5. Your brain is often mismatched to the modern world.

Here’s a strange thing about being human. Even when nothing is wrong with us—when we’re rested, well-fed, well-informed—we make decisions that, on paper, sometimes look completely irrational. We eat ice cream while trying to lose weight. We panic about plane crashes and shrug at car crashes. Behavioral economists have spent decades cataloging these quirks.

But look through the lens of natural selection, and you see a different picture. Many of these “irrationalities” are not glitches at all. They are highly functional survival instincts that worked beautifully a hundred thousand years ago, but they just haven’t caught up to a world of refrigerators, enforceable contracts, and stock markets.

There’s a great example in the research on what economists call the endowment effect. It’s when we refuse to sell something we have just acquired for far more than the maximum price we’d have paid to buy it an instant ago. That looks crazy. But even our close primate relatives share this behavioral leaning, suggesting it has ancient origins.

Colleagues and I ran an experiment with chimpanzees. When we gave one a less-favorite food and offered it the opportunity to trade that for a more-preferred food, the chimp would very often decline to trade. But when re-running the experiment with less-preferred and more-preferred toys—items that have no particular value for survival, health, or reproduction—the chimps traded happily. The “irrational” attachment isn’t random. In this case, it was sensitive to survival value.

We later found that in humans the urge to hold on to something—the classic “bird in the hand” effect—was strongly linked to its evolutionary importance. The more useful an object would have been to our primate ancestors, the more reluctant people were to part with it. Remarkably, that factor alone predicted more than half the variation in people’s attachment to the objects. In some cases, our brains aren’t quirky, and our instincts aren’t broken. They’re just running on yesterday’s operating system.

Once you see your own mind this way, you find it somewhat less mystifying. And you start designing your life—and your defaults, and your contracts, and your policies—for the brain you actually have, instead of the one you wish you had.

Once we learn to see natural selection, we discover a library of solutions, a sharper way of thinking about risk, a kinder understanding of our own minds, and a real chance to work with and in awareness of selection pressures and processes instead of constantly tripping over them. This will help us design smarter technologies, wiser policies, and a more resilient future.

The Big Idea: Gold shouldn't matter as much as it does. It has few practical uses, pays no income, and sits outside the modern financial system. Yet for thousands of years, people across cultures and continents have treated it as the ultimate store of wealth—and they still do today.

Why It Matters: Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in decades, China has been quietly accumulating reserves it refuses to disclose, and the price recently hit record highs above $5,500 an ounce. Whatever story we tell ourselves about modern money, the oldest money in the world is having a moment.

Try This Today: Think about the most valuable object you own. Now ask yourself why it's valuable. Is it useful? Rare? Beautiful? Gold forces us to confront a deeper question: What makes something worth anything at all?

These ideas come from The Secret History of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics, and Power by . Dominic is a financial writer and comedian who has written a weekly column for MoneyWeek for 20 years; his Substack, , ranks among the world’s top financial reads. Read on for seven of his big ideas.

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1. Gold is the first metal human beings ever used.

Tens of thousands of years before the Bronze Age—before iron, tin, or even copper—we were using gold. We found it in riverbeds as little gold nuggets or alluvial gold, and we kept it as jewelry, a prize, or a tool of barter. In other words, we used it for the same reason we use it today: to store and display wealth. Gold is the purest form of wealth there is.

2. To touch gold is the closest you will ever come to touching eternity.

Gold was present in the dust that formed the solar system, and it hasn’t changed. Gold doesn’t rust, it doesn’t tarnish, it’s inert, and it’s as good as impossible to destroy. It always keeps its shine. Therefore, that little bit of gold around your neck or on your finger is not just older than Earth itself—it is older than the solar system. It is the closest thing we have on this planet to permanence. To touch gold is the closest you will ever come to touching eternity.

3. Gold has no use.

Gold has some industrial applications, but these are minimal. Around six percent of the annual gold-mining supply goes into dentistry, and a little bit into mobile phones, space visor coatings, and things like that. But for all intents and purposes, it is useless. Yet we never stop using it. You could take a time machine to any culture in history, anywhere in the world, and they would understand that gold has value. It is truly universal money. Nothing is as useful and as useless at the same time.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is The Art of Pacing by Elizabeth Svoboda. Most of us are stuck between two extremes — endless hustle or complete disengagement — and neither works. Award-winning science writer Elizabeth Svoboda draws on cutting-edge research and interviews with Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs to reveal a third way: pacing. A refreshing antidote to hustle culture for anyone trying to work hard without burning out. Praised by Steve Magness, Carl Honoré, and Simone Stolzoff.

4. Gold is constant.

Just as you can’t destroy gold, you can’t destroy its purchasing power. It buys you as much food, clothing, accommodation, and energy as it did a thousand years ago. If you look at the US dollar, the British pound, or the Euro, they buy you less and less each year. Gold, however, is constant.

5. Gold is the ultimate human motivator.

Empires were built and destroyed for gold. The Romans engineered water wheels and Archimedean screws deep underground just to mine more of it. The Spanish conquest of South America was essentially one giant gold heist. No other substance has driven human beings to do such extraordinary, incredible—but also terrible—things. Why? Because it’s pure wealth.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Launch your business for just $1/month. Start selling today at shopify.com/nbi

6. All the gold in China.

China has been the world’s largest importer of gold for 25 years. It has also been the world’s largest producer of gold for 20 years, and it does not export any of its gold, because it’s not allowed to. So gold is going to China, and China has dramatically understated its gold holdings, perhaps by a factor of 10. Why? What is the significance of this?

Well, I think China has more gold at the national level—not just at the retail level—than the United States government does. And if China were to suddenly turn around and say, “We have much more gold than you,” that would be almost a declaration of financial war. China’s motto is “We must not shine too brightly.” So, if China were to suddenly say, “We have more gold than you,” the US dollar would come under extraordinary threat in the foreign exchange markets, and the announcement would rock financial markets. This is why China discloses the minimum amount to be credible and continues accumulating as it runs extraordinary budget surpluses. Meanwhile, the United States has not audited its gold at Fort Knox in a full, public way since the 1950s.

7. What is gold’s role today?

Gold pays no dividend; it has no official role; it is outside the monetary system—and yet central banks have been accumulating it at the fastest rate in decades. Private investors have been buying too, and the price has hit record highs above $5,500 an ounce. Why does gold keep mattering, even when every rational argument says it shouldn’t?

You can say that gold is natural money, but the horse was natural transport for thousands of years, and then they invented the motor car, quickly making the horse irrelevant. Could you say the same about gold? You’d think so, but people keep buying, hoarding, and accumulating it. Gold still matters.

I’m excited to introduce a new batch of standout nonfiction, the most compelling and thought-provoking titles scheduled for release in June 2026.

As always, we invite longlisted authors to create a “Book Bite”—a fifteen-minute audio recording where they share five big ideas from their book. Picture striking up a conversation with someone at a neighborhood block party…only they happen to be a brilliant nonfiction author.

So, without further ado, here are the June 2026 must-reads…

Download the Next Big Idea App to enjoy “Book Bite” summaries of hundreds of groundbreaking books like these:

Career & Leadership

• The Art of Pacing: A Guide to Balancing Short-Term Demands with Long-Term Thriving by Elizabeth Svoboda. View on Amazon

• Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love! by Mark Pincus. View on Amazon

• Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World by Melissa Swift. View on Amazon

• Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams by Ron Friedman. View on Amazon

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Health

• Fit Mind: 4 Steps to Lasting Bliss–Neuroscience and Meditation for Daily Life by Liam McClintock. View on Amazon

• In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen. View on Amazon

• Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife by Margie Lachman. View on Amazon

• Autoimmunity & The Good Girls: How Permission to Put Ourselves First Has the Power to Keep Us Well by Sara Hirsh Bordo. View on Amazon

Relationships

• Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language by Joe Navarro. View on Amazon

• Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives by Darby Saxbe. View on Amazon

• The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion by Luke Burgis. View on Amazon

• Love Hard On Purpose: Toss the Blueprints. Build Something Honest. by John Kim. View on Amazon

Read on for our picks in Personal Development, Sport, Culture, Technology and more…

Read more

This week, we're exploring what might be the most underrated lever for a better life: other people. Nicholas Epley's new research shows that talking to strangers isn't just tolerable — it's transformative. And the same thread runs through our other conversations this week, whether you're navigating anxiety, sibling dynamics, or the organizations we build together. The common denominator? We consistently underestimate how much our relationships — even the fleeting ones — shape us.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Want to be happier? Try talking to strangers.

Nicholas Epley is a mind reader. But he doesn’t have ESP or practice hypnosis. He’s not telepathic or clairvoyant. Sure, you could ask him to read your fortune, but you’d be better off with a Magic 8 Ball.

When we say Nick is a mind reader, what we mean is he studies mind reading at the University of Chicago — studies, as he puts it, “how we make inferences about each other’s thoughts and beliefs and attitudes, and mostly how we screw that up.”

On this episode, he makes small talk — and big talk — with Rufus about his new book, A Little More Social, which draws on the dozens of studies he’s run with thousands of participants to show that talking to strangers, cringe as it may feel, can enliven your days, lengthen your life, and maybe even heal our politics. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Book Bite of the Week

Are you addicted to anxiety?

Freedom from anxiety comes less from fighting it and more from understanding, accepting, and skillfully responding to it. Owen O’Kane is a psychotherapist and former NHS Clinical Lead with over 30 years of experience in both physical and mental health. Below, he shares five key insights from his new book, Addicted to Anxiety: How to Break the Habit. Check out his key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Hyperadaptive by Melissa M. Reeve. This isn’t another book about AI technology — it’s about the organizational evolution AI demands. Most AI initiatives fail because companies try to bolt AI onto systems built for predictability, not speed. Drawing on four decades of organizational research and case studies from Moderna, Nike, and Toyota, Reeve delivers the missing blueprint: a five-stage path from isolated AI experiments to becoming a Hyperadaptive Organization. Praised by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

How is your relationship with your siblings?

Sibling relationships are often our longest—and sometimes most complicated—connections. In this episode, we explore what siblings can teach us about identity, belonging, and who we become, drawing on new insights from Catherine Carr’s recent book Who’s the Favorite?: The Loving, Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships. Pick up a copy of her book on Amazon or listen to her big ideas on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Fora, a travel agency platform designed for entrepreneurs who want to build and scale their own travel business. Become a Fora Advisor today at foratravel.com/idea

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors get to celebrate the publication of their books today--congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

Melissa Swift, Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World

David Bockino, Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting

Michael Pollack, Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource

Liam McClintock, Fit Mind: 4 Steps to Lasting Bliss--Neuroscience and Meditation for Daily Life

Allycin Powell-Hicks, The Problem with Pretty: Beauty, Bias and the Surprising Science of Good Looks

Ben Mezrich, Checkmate: Genius, Lies, Ambition, and the Biggest Scandal in Chess

Joe Navarro, Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language

Sara Hirsh Bordo, Autoimmunity and the Good Girls: How Permission to Put Ourselves First Has the Power to Keep Us Well

Julie Elion, Mastering Your Mental Game: Secrets from My Twenty-Five Years on the PGA Tour―A Practical Guide to Improving Your Performance in Sports, Work, and Life

Eva zu Beck, The Wilder Way: A Memoir of Adventure, Freedom, and an Uncharted Life

Ijeoma Uchegbu, Chain Reaction: How Chemistry Shapes Us and Our World

Ron Friedman, Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams

The Big Idea: Your accent is more than a way of pronouncing words. It’s a living record of migration, culture, childhood, and belonging. The way you speak carries traces of ancient human journeys, the communities that shaped you, and the social groups you identify with today.

Why It Matters: We often treat accents as markers of intelligence, education, or social status. But linguists see something very different: how language evolves and how humans form communities. Understanding accents can help us challenge our assumptions about other people, and appreciate the remarkable history embedded in everyday speech.

Try This: The next time you hear someone with what you consider an accent, pay attention to your immediate reaction. Are you making assumptions about where they’re from, how educated they are, or what they’re like? Then ask yourself: What story might that accent actually be telling?

Below, shares five key insights from her new book, Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.

Valerie is a professor of linguistics in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She writes a popular language blog on Psychology Today called “Language in the Wild,” and is a professor in The Great Courses series.

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1. Accents are surprisingly ancient.

Accents have been around pretty much as long as talking humans have, and it is a good bet that none of the accents we have today sound anything like the ones that graced the lips of our most ancient ancestors. This is because, about a hundred thousand years ago, when language was a relatively new development in early humans’ mouths, there were just a few (or maybe even a single) language. As Homo sapiens began a large exodus from Africa about 50,000 years later, they brought this language with them.

Over time, these migrating groups began to sound different simply because language naturally changes as it moves through the mouths and minds of speakers. These changes went down different paths for those who had become geographically separated.

To put it in a modern spin, think of small variations, like when the “t” in “water” or “bottle” is said rapidly so it starts to sound more like “wader” and “boduhl.” Those who regularly flock together and talk together pick up on certain variations like these over others, and it is when specific patterns of pronunciation start to identify speaker groups and take on social meaning that they then become accents. For instance, the “waDer” instead of “wawtah” is heard as having a distinctly, and less fancy, North American sound.

2. Accents help us belong.

Accents might have started as simple byproducts of how our mouths work and how early migrations separated us, but the ability to recognize the potential for collaboration or conflict simply from hearing someone speak also offered a survival advantage. Natural selection likely favored both the development of accents and a hard-wired ability to notice them, which would help explain why even very young babies respond more favorably to accents that sound like those spoken at home than to ones they have not heard before.

“Natural selection likely favored both the development of accents and a hard-wired ability to notice them.”

The use of accents to identify those in our group and those outside it has long been part of the human story. Take, for instance, the tale in the Old Testament of two warring Israelite clans, the Gileadites and the Ephraimites. Having captured a strategic crossing at the River Jordan, the Gileadites made all who wanted passage say the Hebrew word “shibboleth,” slaying any who spoke with the distinctive accent of the Ephraimites—an accent identifiable by their pronunciation of that one word alone.

Our mad skills at recognizing accents, though, do not have to end in death or disparagement, because noticing that someone sounds different and judging them for it are two different things. What we should be embracing is how accents are a form of connection that touches us all.

3. Accents are forged in childhood.

Accents might be ancient, but they are also very young, because our own accents emerge in childhood. As anyone who ever cussed in front of their kid already knows, children are little linguistic sponges. Without any training, by the time they’re about a year old, they’ve already figured out the sounds unique to the language they will grow up speaking. And once they understand the specific sounds that will be important, they spend the next five to seven years honing the motor skills needed to pronounce them perfectly. If you think about it, it’s not very surprising these little linguistic savants don’t have time for toilets or utensils.

Once you reach adulthood, you have become a true expert in your native language, but it is exactly this accomplishment that makes it so hard to learn another language once you are old enough to vote. Children come to the language acquisition task with a brain primed for it and a mouth not yet glued to any previous patterns. Adults, on the other hand, have a competing system already in place that needs to be thrown out the window when an unfamiliar trilled “r” or awkward “th” sound comes a-knocking.

Of course, we have all heard the story of our friend’s roommate’s mother’s sister who can pick up languages and sound native at the drop of a hat, but this is by far the exception. One study tested whether 24 Americans who spoke German and had attended graduate school in Germany could fool local judges into believing they were natives. The result was that only one of the Americans passed as sounding like a native speaker.

“Children come to the language acquisition task with a brain primed for it and a mouth not yet glued to any previous patterns.”

What made him different? Research suggests that those rare people who are more naturally gifted at picking up native-like skills are often those who also show strong mimicry and musical abilities and, at least according to some studies, might even process language a bit differently in the brain.

Our goal should not be to lose our accents, but to celebrate the amazing abilities we were gifted as children to soak up that language in the first place.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Hyperadaptive by Melissa M. Reeve. This isn’t another book about AI technology — it’s about the organizational evolution AI demands. Most AI initiatives fail because companies try to bolt AI onto systems built for predictability, not speed. Drawing on four decades of organizational research and case studies from Moderna, Nike, and Toyota, Reeve delivers the missing blueprint: a five-stage path from isolated AI experiments to becoming a Hyperadaptive Organization. Praised by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project.

4. Accents are our history.

Accents are a bit like fossils because they bear the marks of what we’ve been through together, but we often misunderstand how to listen to the stories they tell.

The most noticed accents today—those that signal race, class, or nation—are intimately linked to sociohistorical events that fostered language change and language contact. Over time, certain ways of speaking became linked to particular groups because of how their shared histories and social experiences shaped their speech.

For example, African American Vernacular English is often dismissed as “incorrect” or badly learned English, but the origin of this dialect is much older than that of the standard variety that people claim it falls short of. Many of its most salient features, from the pronunciation of ask as “axe” to the use of double negatives, fell from everyone’s lips in early colonial times. It was these colonial accents that served as a model of English for enslaved people coming from West African language backgrounds.

You might also be surprised to learn that these features were generally well regarded at the time. We see axe instead of ask frequently in Middle English texts ranging from The Canterbury Tales to early translations of the Bible, and double negatives regularly show up in both Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s works. Other African American pronunciations are related to how West African languages influenced this early English, in the same way that the “Minnesooota” accent still has traces of Scandinavian languages now lost but brought over with some early settlers.

“The most noticed accents today are intimately linked to sociohistorical events that fostered language change and language contact.”

During the 20th century, innovative features entered the picture during the massive relocation of African Americans from the South to the urban North during a period known as the Great Migration. De facto segregation, as well as greater cultural consciousness and community, fostered not just a vibrant artistic, musical, and literary legacy, but also a linguistic one. In other words, sounding Black became a source of pride and an expression of shared experience, all of which spurred the development of even greater distinctiveness over the course of the century.

What we hear as today’s African American English arose from a combination of colonial English forms, West African language transfer, and a newly flourishing in-group culture. Now, in the 21st century, not only are new regional dialects emerging, but African American English’s widespread use in music and social media has helped it become increasingly visible and appealing to those well outside that group.

5. Accents can die out.

While some accents (like African American English) are going strong, linguists have discovered that many classic regional accents are on the way out.

We find far fewer speakers sporting the iconic accents we have come to associate with places like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, or the South. Starting with Generation X, dialect studies show that regional accents are losing ground to a more pan-American sound. Despite what you might think, it is not only the internet that is making us sound less like locals. It is also the massive social, economic, and political changes that have swept the nation since the 1970s. This includes increasing suburbanization, the industrialization of the Sunbelt, more non-Southern migration into the urban South, and a rising social consciousness as civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights came to the fore.

More recently, the intense shift to digital culture has radically reshaped how young people relate to one another across geographic and social divides, further eroding the attraction to a local regional sound. But having a less regional accent does not mean we are starting to sound more alike. What linguists have found, instead, is that other accents—like those that identify us as Black or White, rural or urban, and even politically liberal or conservative—are forging the accent divides that will still matter to us in the future.

The Big Idea: Apple’s success wasn’t just about building better technology. It was about making technology more intuitive, more delightful, and more human. The company’s greatest breakthroughs came from people who refused to accept limitations and obsessed over details others considered unimportant.

Why It Matters: Most innovation stories focus on strategy and execution. Apple’s history suggests that breakthrough products often emerge from something messier: curiosity, playfulness, showmanship, unreasonable standards, and a willingness to rethink what everyone else assumes is impossible.

Try This Today: Identify one frustrating process, product, or experience in your life and ask the question Apple teams asked repeatedly: What would make this feel magical instead of merely functional?

These ideas come from Apple: The First 50 Years by . David is a seven-time Emmy Award winner, five-time TED speaker, host of twenty PBS NOVA specials, and spent over two decades as the bestselling author of guides to Macs and iPhones. Read on for 5 of his favorite Apple stories.

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1. Bill Atkinson naked in the hot tub.

Apple followers know that in 1979, there was a famous visit by Steve Jobs and some of his lieutenants to Xerox PARC. That’s the Palo Alto Research Center, a think tank where they were developing next-generation computer products. That’s where Jobs and his team saw an early version of the graphic user interface: black lettering on a white screen with fonts and graphics. There was a mouse. There were menus listing the commands. You didn’t have to memorize the commands. And there were overlapping windows. To Jobs, this was clearly the future of computing, and he told his team, “We’ve got to reproduce that for our upcoming new computer called the Lisa.”

For Bill Atkinson, the star programmer, it was a matter of recreating what he’d seen at Xerox PARC from memory. And the one thing he struggled to imitate was this business of overlapping windows. When you moved a front window aside, instead of immediately revealing what was in the background window, Atkinson was getting a blank white flicker. There just didn’t seem to be enough memory and power to immediately reveal what was in the background window.

Finally, after weeks of effort, he solved the problem with a technical hack. And shortly thereafter, he was in a hot tub at a nudist camp in the California Redwoods. Somebody got into the hot tub naked with him and introduced himself:

“Hi, I’m from Xerox PARC. You must be Atkinson, the guy who famously solved the overlapping windows problem.” Atkinson was very confused: “What are you talking about? I saw that at your guys’ place. I was just trying to figure out how you guys had done it.” And the guy said, “No, we’ve never solved it. We still haven’t solved it. You solved it. You must have misremembered.” And indeed, Atkinson had misremembered seeing that effect at Xerox PARC. They had never solved it.

Atkinson told me upon sharing this story, “It just goes to show that if somebody tells you something’s impossible, you just haven’t thought about it enough.”

2. Steve Jobs and the fish tank.

During the development of the iPod, Steve Jobs was insistent that it be as small as possible. So, one day, his team brought in the latest prototype and said, “Steve, this is it. Doesn’t get any smaller than this. We need a screen. We need that little hard drive. We need a circuit board and a battery. It can’t get any smaller.” Jobs got up from the table, took the prototype, dropped it into the office fish tank, and pointed to the air bubbles coming up from the dropped iPod. And he said, “See those air bubbles? That means there’s still room in there. Get rid of it.”

“Not all the stories are true.”

Such a great story never happened. This story’s been kicking around for years, and not a single person says that it happened, remembers hearing about it, or ever saw it. In fact, there weren’t even fish tanks there. Not all the stories are true.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Hyperadaptive by Melissa M. Reeve. This isn’t another book about AI technology — it’s about the organizational evolution AI demands. Most AI initiatives fail because companies try to bolt AI onto systems built for predictability, not speed. Drawing on four decades of organizational research and case studies from Moderna, Nike, and Toyota, Reeve delivers the missing blueprint: a five-stage path from isolated AI experiments to becoming a Hyperadaptive Organization. Praised by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project.

3. Face ID and the Hollywood masks.

When Apple was developing Face ID, they wanted to make sure that it would unlock your phone no matter what your face looked like—no matter what the facial hair, makeup, or glasses. They wanted to make sure it worked every time. So, they launched the most insane series of testing events.

They hosted Makeup Mondays in the Apple cafeteria, where people were invited to come with weird makeup, weird hair, with glasses, and with wigs to see if they could fool the prototype. They took this thing to a twins conference to see if an identical twin could unlock the phone with their face. They took this thing to Harley-Davidson rallies on the premise that they would find a lot of creative facial hair. They got permission to take this thing out of the country to sub-Saharan African tribes, where the facial structures were different from European facial structures.

Finally, they wanted to make sure that masks would not fool it. They hired a Hollywood special-effects company to create a series of hyper-realistic human heads. I mean, we’re talking about whiskers and stubble and the little lines in your eyes. And sure enough, they made a bunch of these masks to see if the phone would be fooled. It wasn’t fooled by the masks, but they did tell me a great story about the poor guy in the mail room who unpacked the box from Hollywood and saw these 12 dead faces staring back at him with open eyes.

4. The July 1999 Macworld Expo keynote by Steve Jobs and his team.

Jobs was the most unbelievable performer and showman when he gave presentations. He was so funny and would engineer these stunts that left you with unforgettable, indelible impressions of whatever it was he was trying to sell you. The expo in 1999 was particularly amazing because Jobs walked out on the stage in his black turtleneck and his jeans, and he said:

“Thanks for coming. This is going to be a great Macworld. We’ve got some great new products, some really great new products, some insanely great new products, some really, totally, wildly, insanely great new products.”

“Jobs was the most unbelievable performer and showman when he gave presentations.”

Through all of this, the crowd is beginning to ripple. They’re slowly beginning to realize that the person on stage is an imposter. It’s a lookalike. It was Noah Wyle, who had just played Steve Jobs in a TV movie called Pirates of Silicon Valley, and he looked just like him. It was so funny as the audience caught on, and then Jobs came barging on saying:

“That’s not me at all! You’re blowing it. Look, you’re supposed to come over here, open a water, get the slide clicker, then you can put your hands together.”

That was the same keynote when they unveiled the first iBook. This was the laptop version of the iMac, available in blue or orange. They called it the toilet seat iBook because it kind of looked like a closed toilet seat.

A lot of people don’t remember that Apple introduced Wi-Fi to the world—it was at this same keynote. It was the most unbelievably witty demo. Jobs had this thing of ending his discussions by saying, “Now there’s one more thing.” And then he would roll out the best thing of all. And in this case, he had already unveiled the iBook and he said, “Now there is one more thing.” And he opened this thing on a podium and started surfing the web and goes, “Let me show you how I can surf the web on this iBook.” He picks up the iBook and starts walking across the stage:

“Oh, there’s CNN, you can see. And maybe I’ll go to Disney here. I can come over here. Let me show these guys how it works. Come on over here, you want to sit behind me there? No wires.”

It was Wi-Fi. No one had seen it before. It was mind-blowing. And then the pièce de résistance? He took a magician’s hoop and passed it over the iBook just to prove that there were no wires. It was the greatest, funniest demo of all time.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Northwest Registered Agent. They’ve been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/nbifree

5. My favorite Apple story.

In 2007, when the iPhone came out, I wanted to write a book about it called iPhone: The Missing Manual. I needed a way to illustrate the book, but the first iPhone had no way to take screenshots. You may know now that if you press the opposite buttons on the iPhone, you capture a screenshot of the screen as a graphic you can use for any purpose.

I wanted it to illustrate my user manual. I knew there had to be a way to create screenshots because Apple’s ads and documentation were full of them. So, I called Apple PR and said, “How do you guys make screenshots?” And they said, “Well, we’ve developed this software tool internally, but it doesn’t have a nice user interface. It’s just for our own use.” So I begged them to let me use that app to create screenshots.

“I knew there had to be a way to create screenshots because Apple’s ads and documentation were full of them.”

After a lot of hemming and hawing, they first said, “Well, you can fly out here and use it under supervision.” But Steve Jobs killed that idea. Finally, it was settled that I would make a list of the screenshots I wanted to use in the book, describe exactly each one, what phone number it would display, what data would be on the screen, and they would set aside a graphic designer to create these screenshots for me using their tool.

So, some poor guy spent the entire summer taking 400 screenshots for my book. We printed in full color, and they were absolutely gorgeous, as you can imagine. Years later, I found out who it was, and I sent him a nice gift. But the point is that when Apple was coming out with a new iPhone, I needed to create an updated edition of my book. I called my Apple PR contact and said, “You going to have a guy spend his summer making screenshots for me again?”

This time they said, “No, we’re never doing that again. We have, however, come up with something we call the Pogue feature. We will set up a feature involving pressing two buttons that lets anyone take a screenshot, however they want and whenever they want.” To this day, every time I take a screenshot, I smile knowing that internally it was called the Pogue feature.

The Big Idea: Many of us spend our careers trying to become better workers without ever stopping to examine whether the work itself is designed well. Effectiveness starts by understanding what your job actually is, what it requires, and what conditions make success possible.

Why It Matters: Modern work often celebrates busyness, multitasking, and endless collaboration. But those habits can make us less productive, more overwhelmed, and less satisfied. By questioning some of our assumptions about work, we can accomplish more while feeling less stressed.

Try This Today: Ask yourself one simple question: What are the three most important outcomes I’m actually responsible for? Then compare your answer with how you spent your last week. The gap may reveal your biggest opportunity for improvement.

These ideas come from the new book Effective: How to Do Great Work in a Fast-Changing World by Melissa Swift. Melissa is the founder and CEO of Anthrome Insight and a regular contributor to MIT Sloan Management Review. Read on for five of her big ideas.

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1. Most of us are not on a first-name basis with our own jobs.

When you started your current job role, did you sit there and assiduously pore over the job description for hours? Don’t worry—me neither. Most job descriptions are rough approximations of the work you will actually be doing. Who cares about the job on paper when the job in practice is what you get paid for?

But there is a wrinkle. If you asked many of the people around you—your boss, your coworkers, your customers—what they think you should be doing all day, you might get a very different answer from what it is you actually do all day. That dissonance trips up both our performance and our happiness.

We spend hours analyzing our behavior and don’t look closely enough at the other critical half of the equation: what is the work we’re asked to do? Sitting down and discussing the nature of your actual job with the people around you can be an incredibly productive conversation.

Bonus: Unlike talking about how you do your job, discussing what’s in the job itself is emotionally neutral. Dollars to donuts, you’ll discover some points of confusion and friction that, if remedied, could change your day-to-day work life for the better.

2. Think about technology like a crow.

Crows, research shows, get actual pleasure from using technology. A crow performing a task using a stick (which is cutting-edge tech in the crow world) derives more pleasure from the effort than a crow performing the same task with their teeny, little beak.

In our private lives, this is often true. It’s fun to use everything from funny face filters on your phone to a good saucepan on the stove. Technology can be delightful! It generally isn’t at work, though. And while some of this phenomenon comes from, as the old adage puts it, Flintstones at work, Jetsons at home (old, crummy technology at work, new shiny tech at home), some of the feeling of frustration and annoyance with technology comes from the fact that we’ve been taught to use work tech in a joyless fashion. We’re pushed to train up quickly, get what we need from a piece of tech, and move on.

If you think about tech you use successfully in your home life, you probably toyed around with it a bit first, right? There was a sense of childlike play. And you played with whatever the technology was until you got a bit good at it, too—whereas at work we often get to the point of being barely competent and then we plateau.

So, carve out some bandwidth to truly play with new technologies and pick one or two pieces of tech that you’re going to get great at. As your enjoyment goes up, your annoyance goes down, and everything proceeds more smoothly as a consequence.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Hyperadaptive by Melissa M. Reeve. This isn’t another book about AI technology — it’s about the organizational evolution AI demands. Most AI initiatives fail because companies try to bolt AI onto systems built for predictability, not speed. Drawing on four decades of organizational research and case studies from Moderna, Nike, and Toyota, Reeve delivers the missing blueprint: a five-stage path from isolated AI experiments to becoming a Hyperadaptive Organization. Praised by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project.

3. Humans are built to collaborate, but not too much.

The white sclera of humans’ eyes exists for a reason. When prehistoric people were hunting, having white parts of their eyes allowed them to silently communicate with the folks they were hunting with. They could gesture toward, let’s say, a woolly mammoth without having to yell and scare the woolly mammoth away. Collaboration: we are literally designed for it.

Fabulous, right? Well, yes, but it’s possible to over-collaborate, and that’s happening a lot right now. The European Working Conditions Survey identified excess interdependence—having to interact with too many people to get any task done—as a driver of work intensification, which causes soul-sucking burnout and productivity losses. In research my company conducted last year, we found that people who reported needing to involve a large number of people to get their work done were 49 percent more likely to always or often feel overwhelmed than their peers. Conversely, people who felt they were highly effective were 16 percent more likely to report being able to work largely independently.

Now, I’m not going full Jean-Paul Sartre “hell is other people” here, but rather I’m arguing for “figure 8” style collaboration. Work together, go away and work alone, then come back together. The endless email chains and back-to-back meetings are doing no one any favors. We don’t need to work together all the time—just when it matters.

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4. If knowledge workers worked like lives were on the line, we’d do our jobs differently.

I spoke to a firefighter, an air traffic controller, and an emergency room physician, and the contrast between how they do their jobs and how I have done mine could not be sharper.

For example, it’s common in the corporate world to multi-task—to do two things at the same time—or even to double hat—to do two jobs at the same time. Guess who doesn’t do that? Firefighters. Definitionally, when things are not metaphorically on fire, you can’t do two things at once. As NYC firefighter Ro Rodriguez described, you cannot be the person holding the rope and the person rappelling down the building. You need to pick a lane and do it well.

To take another example, in the corporate world we often don’t say exactly what we mean. Euphemisms and jargon abound! Emergency room doctors don’t have that option. ER physician Dr. Rebecca Parker explained to me that when someone’s loved one has died, you must tell their family members that fact in clear terms, making sure to use the word “died.” It’s not clever in her world to be vague and dance around the matter—it would be inhuman and unkind to do so. This is a level of clarity in communications that would serve us all well in corporate life.

5. You can’t always be effective.

When you look at what your job really is, it may have a fatal flaw. Most often, this fatal flaw is that you are asked to accomplish something without the resources or organizational power to do it: Leading through influence! Being a change agent! Vibes! This does not work. If your job is broken down in such a way, your chances of succeeding are very low.

On a similar front, you may have taken a job the organization doesn’t want. You’re probably asking, how can the organization not want my job? They hired me to do it! The reality is that some jobs are created because the organization inherently struggles to do that work—meaning you’ll struggle too. A great example is when organizations build innovation teams from the outside because they haven’t created the conditions for anyone to be successful at innovation.

Plenty of other things may be showstoppers for effectiveness, too: anything from your boss doing your job for you to the organization tolerating so much mediocrity that you have no chance of being great. Effectiveness isn’t universally available.

The Big Idea: Sibling relationships shape us in ways we barely understand. They are among our longest-lasting bonds, but they often operate beneath the surface of our attention until a family crisis, an inheritance dispute, or a major loss brings them into focus.

Why It Matters: We spend enormous energy understanding our parents, children, spouses, and friends. Yet siblings often share our deepest history, our earliest memories, and our longest timeline. Learning to navigate these relationships with greater honesty and empathy can improve not only family life today, but our well-being decades from now.

Try This Today: Call, text, or email a sibling and ask them about a childhood memory you both experienced. Instead of debating whose version is "correct," get curious about why each of you remembers it differently.

These ideas come from Who’s the Favorite?: The Loving, Messy Realities of Sibling Relationships by Catherine Carr. Catherine is the former producer of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour and host of the podcast Relatively, a series exploring sibling dynamics. Read on for 5 of her big ideas:

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1. Most people know their siblings longer than they’ll ever know anyone else.

Right at the start of the pandemic, I was on the phone with an old colleague who I used to work with in radio. I was talking about my sisters and joked that I should make a podcast about them. She said, “Don’t do that. That would be a bit strange, but maybe you should make a podcast about siblings. Did you know your relationship with them could be the longest of your life?”

I had never heard that idea before, and, seeing as the genes in my family tend toward longevity—my grandma was 99 when she died—that could mean I would know my two sisters, one older and one younger, for around 83 and 87 years, respectively. I sat up like I’d been struck by lightning. After that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about brothers and sisters. It was as if a filter had been put over my eyes: in every book, every film, every friendship, every relationship, I suddenly saw the sibling dynamics at play, and I became obsessed.

These relationships are unique. They start off vertically due to birth order, but over time, those relationships can move from vertical to horizontal, becoming more peer-like. We can become friends with our siblings. We can stand in the same spot in time and survey the future and the past together. It’s an incredible relationship that evolves so much over those decades from playmates to adults. We might make each other uncles and aunties or give one another brothers- and sisters-in-law. Then, if we get through the midlife crunch, we could get to old age together. Research shows that strong sibling bonds pay off in well-being later in life.

2. We should talk more about sibling bonds.

We simply don’t talk about siblings enough. I’ve heard siblings described as the missing piece of psychoanalysis. The therapists I spoke with said they were heavily trained in parent-child and romantic relationships, but not as much in sibling relationships that turn from vertical to horizontal.

“I’ve heard siblings described as the missing piece of psychoanalysis.”

When people talk about siblings, they get snagged and stuck on birth-order tropes. We joke about the responsible eldest and roll our eyes at the spoiled babies. Maybe there’s a grain of truth in some of that, but we must get beyond that to fully understand these bonds.

My aim is to provide a kind of language to make us more fluent in talking about sibling relationships. We already have a lot in the culture that enables conversations about romantic partners or parents—we have the words. I don’t think we have the words yet for siblings.

3. Why siblings end up in therapy in midlife.

There’s a pattern in sibling relationships that can be compared to the shape of an egg timer. Generally, we grow up in the same house, so we spend a lot of time with them when we’re young. This is the fat bit at the bottom of the egg timer.

In early adulthood or late adolescence, we tend (in the West) to leave home, strike out, search for partners and a job, maybe go to college, find a flat—all those things. We move into different life stages, and it can feel like you’re leaving people behind or being left behind. If you don’t yet have a partner or a job or your own home, you can feel quite far away from those people around you who have moved into those life stages. And that’s quite true with siblings. This phase is that skinny bit in the middle of the egg timer, representing a leaner time for sibling contact.

The fatter bit at the top of the egg timer is when we arrive in middle age, and that’s quite a broad and deep part of life. It lasts a long time. And by that point, we’ve all realized a little bit what life is like. We’ve had some knocks and arrived at the same period together. And it’s around this age that our parents might start to grow frailer, certainly older, and may die. That is the key point at which adult siblings are thrust back into each other’s orbits if they haven’t already sought each other out.

If, in the process of reaching midlife, you and your siblings never moved from a vertical, hierarchical pattern to something more horizontal, like friendship—if those old, often two-dimensional labels haven’t been replaced by a fuller understanding and appreciation of each other as functioning adults—then reconnecting during a time of emotional upset can be difficult. We might fall back into old patterns of relating to one another that aren’t very helpful and may not sustain us through the difficult challenges of finding care homes, caring for our parents ourselves, or deciding what to do with family homes and inheritance. This is a major flashpoint for sibling upset, argument, and estrangement.

“We might fall back into old patterns of relating to one another that aren’t very helpful and may not sustain us through the difficult challenges.”

Even though it’s natural that there’s that skinnier bit in the middle when we’re all going out into the world, I think there’s something in the idea of trying to intentionally make friends with our siblings in adulthood. By laying down good foundations for that crunch in midlife, we might manage those difficult chapters better and emerge as happier older people ourselves as a result.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is Hyperadaptive by Melissa M. Reeve. This isn't another book about AI technology — it's about the organizational evolution AI demands. Most AI initiatives fail because companies try to bolt AI onto systems built for predictability, not speed. Drawing on four decades of organizational research and case studies from Moderna, Nike, and Toyota, Reeve delivers the missing blueprint: a five-stage path from isolated AI experiments to becoming a Hyperadaptive Organization. Praised by Gene Kim, author of The Phoenix Project.

4. Estrangement is more common than you think.

In 2021, the author Fern Schumer Chapman wrote a book about her estrangement from her brother. She told her publisher she’d like to include the word “estrangement” in the title, and they told her, “Don’t do that. Nobody knows what that means.” Here we are in 2026, and we’ve seen some really public, very sad stories of estrangement play out in the media: the Beckhams, the Murdochs, and the British royal family.

I think we do know what that word means now, but did you know that 28 percent of siblings go through a period of estrangement? And it’s not binary. It’s not “cut off,” as perhaps unhelpfully discussed on social media. It’s more of a moving in and out of intimacy over time.

It’s important to think about estrangement because, for all I’ve said about the goal of making friends and becoming equals with your brothers and sisters, I don’t believe we should feel obligated to be anything in particular to them. That expectation—reflected in foundational stories like Cain and Abel, as well as in morality tales and nursery rhymes across cultures—can be harmful. If we internalize the idea of what we ought to be to our siblings, we may feel unable to acknowledge or complain when those relationships are hurtful, even violent or deeply upsetting. That, I think, is damaging. And because we don’t talk about sibling relationships enough, we rarely confront these realities.

We don’t talk about sibling violence. We don’t talk about what it’s like when those relationships break down, or how it feels to sit on a distant branch of the family tree—aware that you’re still connected to this person, yet lacking the language to articulate that connection. Maybe you don’t even feel able to talk about it with others because it has been largely taboo until recently.

Estrangement also gets to the heart of the sibling experience and the paradox of a “shared childhood,” which, in many ways, isn’t really shared at all. Although we often spend a lot of time physically together in the same home, our experiences of growing up are totally different, and our memories of that time are different. There are so many variables that no childhood can be the same as another’s, even if siblings are born to the same parents and live in the same place. Your parents will be older or younger than they were when your sibling was born. They might be richer or poorer. You might have lost a grandparent or gained a family pet. You might be at a different school than your siblings. You may have moved countries. Your personality may bring out different aspects of your parents’ personalities.

“If we internalize the idea of what we ought to be to our siblings, we may feel unable to acknowledge or complain when those relationships are hurtful.”

When we talk about childhood memories, the variability between siblings’ experiences becomes clear. The way we lay down, store, and recollect memories has so much to do with what we were feeling when the event happened. You might have gone to the coast with your older brother, and that is why you are terrified of the sea, because you remember those wild waves that threatened to sweep you off the beach. But your older brother loves the sea, and when he thinks about that day spent together, he doesn’t remember anything about the rough waves at all. The reason for the difference in experience could be as simple as the fact that you were two and he was six. The waves were big to you and very small to him. This example is small, but it applies to almost everything about our childhood.

Sibling perspectives will never be the same. As adults, if we want to make friends with our siblings, part of that process is accepting that each child of a family will have a different set of feelings tightly wound around memories of the same times. Memories aren’t like DVDs. So, if you talk about your shared memories and your different memories with your brothers and sisters, then you must respect everybody else’s memories and maybe accept a messy collage of your childhoods. Who’s to say which bits are true? The key is that you can agree on the compromise.

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5. Sibling bereavement.

Siblings who lose a brother or sister are often called the forgotten mourners. They’re asked to support everyone else through their loss and are rarely given attention to how the experience affects them. If parents lose one of their children, that’s a loss that we recognize as titanic. Similarly, if a child loses a parent, we recognize how incredibly difficult that is. But we don’t talk enough about a sibling losing somebody with whom they have shared their entire history.

However imperfectly, siblings remember each other’s roles in the family story. Your sibling is your best chance to travel back in time to those family holidays, sitting in the back car seat with your brother or sister on the way to grandma’s house. That history your sibling can help you keep is lost when they die.

“Your sibling is your best chance to travel back in time to those family holidays, sitting in the back car seat with your brother or sister on the way to grandma’s house.”

We often take our siblings for granted because we know they might be with us for those 70, 80, 90 years. And because they’re blood, we almost assume that they are not going anywhere. When they do go, that creates a very complicated kind of grief.

I end by talking about bereavement because I think unless and until we’ve talked about all the other aspects of our sibling relationship—from birth order through the idea of labels and roles that we might assume in the family, to memories, to being friends—until we’ve done all of that, we can’t really appreciate the enormity of what it might be to lose a sibling.

The Big Idea: Statistical thinking isn’t a math skill, it’s a reasoning skill. And once you have it, you start catching things most people miss: the survey that left out a whole generation, the study that only shared the convenient results, the headline that sounds definitive but proves nothing. Data is everywhere. The ability to question it well is rare.

Why It Matters: We’re living through a flood of statistics, studies, and expert claims on health, money, diet, and more. Most of it arrives without context, caveats, or any indication of how the data was collected. The people who know to ask “who’s missing from this sample?” or “what would disprove this?” navigate that flood differently. They’re harder to mislead, and they make better decisions.

Try This Today: The next time you encounter a surprising statistic, ask two questions before you act on it or share it: Who was in this data? And who might have been left out?

These ideas come from What Are the Odds?: A Statistical Guide to Certainty in an Uncertain World by Mark Prell. Mark is a former senior economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Co-Chair of the Federal Committee on Statistical Methodology, and economics professor at Johns Hopkins University. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Data and their quality are important.

You might analyze data for a business, a hospital, a school district, or this evening you might read about, say, the latest dietary advice on a webpage. Along the way, you will want to ask two key questions: “What do the data say?” and “Are the data any good?” All data have strengths and limitations. You want to understand the data’s quality, which involves accuracy along with several other dimensions of quality, such as relevance, granularity, and timeliness.

It may be intuitive that poor data can affect a study’s conclusions. What is more subtle is how data quality can be diminished or enhanced based on how the data are collected. One story of a threat to data quality, which had national implications, emerged in the early 2000s when households were getting rid of their landline phone service, turning instead to cell phones.

Back then, most organizations that conducted phone surveys were still relying on old-fashioned methods that called numbers only for landline telephones. As a result, data for young adults tended to be missed in these surveys because young adults disproportionately relied on cell phones. Although certain adjustments are possible to make corrections, national estimates can be affected by such discrepancies. Fortunately, by the end of the 2010s, most survey organizations had added cell phone numbers to the mix.

In data about people, it is a good idea to consider which demographic groups are captured well, and which might be underrepresented or even missing altogether in the data. There is an old saying: If the strands of your fishing net are six inches apart, you will think that all fish in the lake are bigger than six inches.

2. Statistics is about finding patterns in our data.

What does it mean to find a pattern in the data? A striking example comes from the dawn of statistics, and it shows why data can be so valuable and why statistics can be so engaging.

Beginning in 1603, an account of burials and christenings in London was published each week, along with an annual summary at the end of each year. The data were collected from individual Anglican churches, totaled up for the city, and published in what was called the Bills of Mortality. Through continuous monitoring, the weekly Bills could serve as an early warning system to indicate when a plague was gathering force. But the Bills of Mortality had other uses too.

“It is a good idea to consider which demographic groups are captured well, and which might be underrepresented or even missing altogether in the data.”

John Graunt was a little-known cloth merchant in London who had a knack for numbers. Graunt is widely considered to be the father of statistics due to the one book he wrote, first published in 1662. Graunt was the first person to assemble the many years’ worth of dusty Bills of Mortality, and then use the data to study the patterns that they revealed.

Notably, he discovered evidence that the official counts of plague deaths in the Bills undercounted how many deaths were actually due to plague. The statistical approach he developed to make that discovery about plague deaths has modern applications. In 2022, using a method that rests on John Graunt’s pioneering work, the World Health Organization estimated for various countries the excess mortality due to COVID-19.

Today's Book of the Day sponsor is Quiet Strength by Margaret Cullen, with a foreword by Dr. Daniel J. Siegel. Cullen, founder of Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance, draws on decades of mindfulness practice to reveal the power of equanimity — the ancient practice of being fully present with life's struggles without being hijacked by them. Featuring guided meditations and groundbreaking research, this is a roadmap to finding peace amid chaos.

3. Bayes’ Theorem.

Bayes’ Theorem shows the connection between observable effects and hidden underlying causes. This theorem is not a new one, it is simply a very valuable one. It was developed by Thomas Bayes, an English minister, who died in 1761; his theorem was nearly lost, but a friend reviewed Bayes’ papers and published it.

One use of Bayes’ Theorem is for the detection of cancer. A mammogram can be used as a test to assess whether a woman shows signs of breast cancer. Like other medical tests, it is not 100 percent conclusive because sometimes it can be mistaken—in two opposite ways.

• A test can miss detecting cancer that is present.

• A test can falsely say that cancer is present when the patient is free of cancer.

So, the medical and statistical question becomes: when a mammogram indicates that cancer is present, what is the probability that the patient has cancer?

Bayes’ Theorem answers the question and, fortunately, a solution can be found using a pen-and-paper diagram, which for many people can be more intuitive and interpretable than a complex equation. The test result, along with Bayes’ Theorem, informs and empowers both the patient and the doctor. If a mammogram says that cancer is present, they may decide to proceed with a biopsy for stronger evidence. A benefit of using a mammogram as an initial, non-invasive test is that it spares many women from getting biopsies.

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4. Ethics are essential for, and come from, scientific and statistical practice.

In 1965, the biologist Jacob Bronowski published the book Science and Human Values. Bronowski’s central proposition was that certain values or ethics come from within science itself because they are conditions for its practice. Even for a simple verification of a fact, any one of us needs to rely on others and, specifically, to trust their word.

Bronowski wrote much about trust and connected it to the ethical principle of truthfulness. That principle is obligatory for each scientist. Truthfulness includes honesty—that we do not lie. Moreover, truthfulness also demands that we not leave out a relevant part of the truth. That is what the cherry pickers do, meaning those phony experts who pick through data or quotes or the body of evidence to select only those points that make their arguments seem strong.

“Truthfulness also demands that we not leave out a relevant part of the truth.”

To Bronowski, the search for truth creates a web of interrelated values beyond truthfulness, including independence and dissent. However, if honesty and dissent were the only values practiced by scientists, nobody would be listening to anybody else. Science would fail. In response, the community of scientists works hard to instill additional values of mutual respect and tolerance. The Ethical Guidelines of the American Statistical Association provide helpful details on how researchers should conduct themselves.

Today, our society can benefit by learning more about the ethics of science and statistics. The community of truthfulness and respect is not exclusively for scientists. The community knows no bounds, and it helps sustain civil society. It is open to any of us.

5. The scientific method is about disproof rather than proof.

In the mid-1900s, a new perspective emerged that has influenced how scientists think about what they are doing as they conduct experiments and statistical tests. This view holds that science cannot “prove” a hypothesis or theory to be a final, unchanging, irrefutable “proven” truth. Instead, experiments can disprove a hypothesis. The process of disproof is called falsification.

As the tools for statistical testing tools developed in the 1900s, they made use of and contributed to the methodology of falsification. In his monumental 1937 book on designing experiments, Ronald Fisher, a British statistician and geneticist, wrote that the null hypothesis is never proved or established, but is possibly disproved by the experiment.

In Fisher’s language, the “null hypothesis” is the hypothesis or theory that is potentially “nullified”—that is, falsified—by the experiment. And he wrote that every experiment exists only to give the facts a chance of disproving the null hypothesis.

“The process of disproof is called falsification.”

When observed data do fit a hypothesis—when the hypothesis is not falsified—then the data are said to be consistent with the hypothesis or theory, or to support or corroborate it. But that confirmation of the theory does not prove the theory to be true, forever and always.

For example, in the 1900s, Einstein’s general theory of relatively superseded Newton’s theories about gravity and the laws of motion by elaborating and improving on what Newton accomplished. Although tests and applications of Newtonian theory had been successful for generations, even such extensive data did not prove Newtonian theory to be unimprovably true. While today data are consistent with Einstein’s theory, sooner or later that theory may face disparities with data that require it to be modified. The process never ends: there will always be more experiments to run, more anomalies to find, and better theories to imagine.

The Memorial Day holiday this week wasn’t just a day off work, though I do hope you got that. It also offered us a chance to honor those who gave their lives in service to our country, and it left us thinking about what being an American is really all about. As this week’s podcast guest points out, it’s a somewhat unstable identity, one whose meaning has evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Read on to dive into an oratorical history of the nation, along with other big ideas we came across this week.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

What does it mean to be American?

America’s a funny place. It’s not a country with a fixed geographic or religious identity. We don’t have a common story of divine creation. “What we have,” writes in his new book, ⁠All We Say⁠, “are words.” The words of the founding documents, yes — but also “the words of speeches spoken by Americans who call us to be that better version of ourselves.”

Ben has spent more time with great American speeches than just about anyone. For eight years, he was a speechwriter in the Obama White House, crafting some of the defining oratory of the era. His new book is a 250-year tour through 15 speeches that built the country, challenged it, and raised its sights.

He tells us how FDR changed the course of WWII from behind the lectern, how MLK ad-libbed one of the most famous lines in American history, and what Obama’s 2008 speech about race can teach today’s politicians about storytelling. And he makes the case that America needs great oratory now more than it has in a long time. Check out our conversation with Ben on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Book Bite of the Week

Can walking change your life?

Walking and foot health are fundamental to overall health — not optional fitness habits. Unfortunately, modern lifestyles and footwear are weakening the body’s evolved design for regular movement. Fitness experts Dr. Milica McDowell and Dr. Courtney Conley share five key insights from their new book, Walk: Rediscover the Most Natural Way to Boost Your Health and Longevity―One Step at a Time on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

🎉 Happy Publication Week! 🎉

The following Next Big Idea Club Must-Read authors got to celebrate the publication of their books this week — congratulations to them all! 📖 Join us in reading and discussing these exciting new releases:

, All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches

Eric Ries, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad... and How Great Companies Stay Great

Jack Parlett, Flamboyance: The Power of Living Boldly

Soumaya Keynes & Chad P. Bown, How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy

Stephanie Coontz, For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage

, A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Quince. Refresh your spring wardrobe and get free shipping and 365-day returns at quince.com/nbi

Listen to this article instead:

The Big Idea: The internet hasn’t just changed how we communicate, it’s changed who we are. When screens became two-way, we became two-way too: simultaneously human beings and pieces of media. That shift has consequences we’re only beginning to reckon with.

Why It Matters: Objectification used to be something that happened to people. Online, it’s the default condition. Every video call, every post, every scroll turns us into images of ourselves — watched, judged, and consumed. The result isn’t just anxiety. It’s a slow erosion of how we relate to each other.

Try This Today: The next time you’re about to send a sharp message to someone online, pause and imagine saying it to their face. That gap between what you’d type and what you’d say in person is the “online disinhibition effect.” and noticing it is the first step to more humane communication.

These ideas come from Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber. Megan is a staff writer at The Atlantic who covers culture, and a former reporter at the Nieman Journalism Lab and critic at the Columbia Journalism Review. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

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1. The internet is rapidly changing what it means to be human.

In recent years, the word “human” has become something of a cliche. Goods are marketed as “human-powered,” and we compliment people by saying things like “what a great human.” That language reflects the reality—and the anxiety—of life in these early days of the digital age. The internet can sometimes seem like an endless CAPTCHA test, always asking us to prove that we are, in fact, humans (rather than, say, a product of AI). And language that literally humanizes people is acknowledging the broad consequences of that demand. “Human,” in digital spaces and more broadly, is no longer a given. It’s becoming one possibility among many.

Someone who anticipated that shift was Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian theorist best known for his idea that “the medium is the message.” For McLuhan, communications technologies like TV and newspapers—what he would call mediums—are different from other kinds of technologies. They might seem like things that we use and control; they might seem like straightforward conveyors of what today we’d call content. But—and this is the message part—mediums shape the content, too. And along the way, they shape the humans who consume it.

McLuhan introduced his theories in the 1960s, when the medium that was transforming life was television. He was talking about screens, but ones that operated, essentially, in one direction: TVs broadcast moving images and audiences consumed them.

But the screens of the internet work much, much differently. They’re not one-way propositions. They are interactive. Think of a service like Zoom, which turns “see and be seen” into a technological proposition. Two-way screens, in general, remake us as two-way people. On them, we’re both humans and pieces of media, three-dimensional bodies and two-dimensional images—we’re whos and whats at once. The duality is basic, in one way—it’s just how screens work—but they’re also deeply consequential. After all, in the world at large, “objectification” is widely recognized as a violation: as an insult, as a problem. In the world of screens, though, objectification is just a fact of physics. Objectification is the internet’s price of admission.

“Two-way screens, in general, remake us as two-way people.”

And screen-based objectification is becoming ever more common and ever more systematized. As the internet edges ever closer to becoming a way of life, screens are expanding from what they’ve been for so long—things people watch—into things people inhabit. They are places where a growing number of humans work, meet, learn, date, fight, laugh, and live their lives. Screens are technologies that are also, in a very real sense, human environments. And, every day, we’re doing what all creatures do when they contend with new environments: We’re adapting to them. And often, whether we mean to or not, we’re conceding to them.

2. “Main character energy” is becoming a cultural crisis.

A few years ago, the clothing chain H&M launched an ad campaign based on the idea that the store’s clothes would allow the people who wore them to become “the main character of each day.” The campaign was nicely prescient. Main characters—the exhibitors of “main character energy”—are everywhere these days. It’s common now for people to talk about their own character arcs, about “the writers” who allegedly script out world events, about people who have “lost the plot,” and people who have been “canceled.”

Such language isn’t fully new. Americans have traditionally admired people who are “larger than life” and seem cinematic. Sociologists have long talked about performance as a framework for understanding everyday social interactions. But the internet is bringing a new literalism to those ideas—in large part because its screens are stages that never end. On screens, we watch the spectacles, and we are the spectacles. We become each other’s critics. We become each other’s fun. All the world’s a stage, that longstanding metaphor, is becoming more like a mandate.

The consequences of that shift are expanding to nearly every facet of life, online and off. Screens, because they double as inescapable mirrors, are making self-consciousness ever more standardized. And many people now talk about daily life as a source of endless performance anxiety. They talk about the “fear of being perceived.” TikTokers have coined terms like “cocooning” and “bedrotting” to describe not just being at home but, specifically, staying home as a soothing alternative to the demands of public exposure.

Their reticence is revealing. When all the world’s a stage, all the world is also a set. Smartphones, on top of everything else, are movie studios in miniature, carried around in people’s pockets. They mean that anyone with a phone can become a cinematographer, producer, and content creator. Anyone can find themselves as the star—or the extra, or the scenery—in someone else’s show, whether they’ve consented to the spotlight or not.

We have everyday people becoming everyday celebrities. Celebrity elevates people, but it also tends to demean them, and sometimes even dehumanize them. Historically, celebrities have been people who function a lot like fictions: They’ve been what the artist Andy Warhol once called “half people.” Celebrity is becoming more accessible, or you might even say more democratized. But that also means that more people run the risk of getting cut down to size.

3. On screens, those most basic of facts—people—can come to seem like fictions.

In a social media post he sent in 2022, Donald Trump posed a question: “Why are people so mean?” he asked. It was a good question. And “main character” energy is one answer: Screens can muddle the distinction between real people and fictional ones. They can also make it easier than ever to wound people we’ve never met.

“Screens can muddle the distinction between real people and fictional ones.”

Screens do more than objectify people. They also distance people from one another. And physical distance has a way of becoming moral distance, too. Think how much easier it would be to speak badly of someone behind their back than to criticize them to their face.

Media theorists talk about the “online disinhibition effect”: the basic idea that some people behave differently in digital spaces than they would in physical ones. One explanation they offer for the discrepancy is that online environments can seem unreal to people in ways that IRL environments simply don’t. That explanation can extend to the people who populate those environments—especially when those real, human people are coexisting with bots and the pseudo-“people” generated by artificial intelligence. “Is that person real?” was once a question asked primarily by bigots. On the internet, though—and as a basic matter of digital hygiene—it’s a question we need to keep asking.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is Effective by Melissa Swift. The modern workplace feels increasingly impossible — work has intensified, chaos seems constant, and everything seems designed to make you feel incompetent. Swift, founder of Anthrome Insight, offers a refreshingly practical path: how to get your job done well without losing your mind. Drawing surprising lessons from professions where failure isn’t an option — firefighters, air traffic controllers, ER doctors — this is a paradigm-shifting guide for anyone trying to do meaningful work today.

4. The internet is revolutionary, but it is not unprecedented.

In 17th-century England, King James ordered his royal printers to create new editions of the King James Bible. They dutifully completed their assignment, only later to realize that in the editions they had just mass-produced, the Ten Commandments were missing a word. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” read as “Thou shalt commit adultery.” The typo, best I can tell, did not give rise to a spate of cheating scandals in early modern England. But the misprinted text—which would later be called the “Wicked Bible”—encouraged a different form of infidelity.

Before the printing press came along, Bibles were created by scribes. They were works of craftsmanship that could take months, sometimes even years, to produce. Bibles were rare and expensive, making the Church and its clergy the Bible’s gatekeepers. They presented its teachings to laypeople as both the law of the land and the mystic gift of an infallible deity—with text that was meant not to be questioned but simply obeyed.

But then that text got typos. The Word of God became the words of God—and the words, sometimes, conflicted. The early days of the printing press were also the early days of market capitalism. The two developments were deeply interconnected. And the Wicked Bible, however singular it was in its errors, had a lot of company. Its misprint was one of many that occurred as printers raced to get God’s words to market. The sloppiness had broad implications, especially because Christianity back then was so much more than a religion. It was politics. It was culture. It was life’s organizing principle. The Bible had been the source code for all of that. But the misprints suggested that the code could have bugs.

“The early days of the printing press were also the early days of market capitalism.”

That was destabilizing for people of the time. But it might feel quite familiar, too. The printing press brought transformations that anticipated the ones we’re navigating today: new forms of democratization, new forms of literacy, new forms of art and expression and knowledge—the old gatekeepers falling, and new ones clamoring to rise in their place. Our version of that can be even more unsteadying because it is also deeply personal. The printing press changed how people saw the world. The internet is changing how people see one another.

5. “The algorithm” is not destiny.

The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He meant the line as a nod to technology’s power. Today, the line might read more as a warning. The internet is machinery that can seem like magic, precisely because it often doesn’t seem like machinery at all.

Yes, its screens are objects made of metal and glass, and, yes, the worlds within those screens are designed by people who are guided by extremely analog incentives—money, status, and power—but many of the ways we talk about screens (as environments) downplay those realities. The internet as “ether,” for example, its information stored in the “cloud,” its workings decided by “the algorithm,” that formless entity that affects everyone and answers to no one. It’s easy to treat the internet as just another technology, indistinguishable from magic. But the treatment is counterproductive and simply incorrect. The internet is not a mystical force. It is not a foregone conclusion. It is machinery. Magical thinking may soothe us, but it won’t save us.

The internet was created by people in the hope that the endless connection it afforded would help us be more human and more humane. Every day, we’re testing whether those early ideals can still be realized. We’re making small choices that, taken together and over time, will shape what it means to be human on, and in, our screens. We owe it to ourselves, and the people who will follow us, to choose wisely.