What if saving the planet could be fun?

Despite decades of urgency and alarm, progress on climate change has felt frustratingly slow. What if we’ve been going about it all wrong? Elizabeth Dunn and Jiaying “JZ” Zhao think there’s a missing ingredient in the conversation: joy.

In their new book, Leave the Lights On, Liz and JZ draw on psychology, behavioral science, and sustainability research to argue that the most effective climate solutions aren’t rooted in guilt, fear, or self-denial. They’re rooted in easy choices that also make your life better.

Today on the show: why doom-and-gloom messaging backfires, what bacon dipped in maple syrup has to do with saving the planet, how buying more underwear might just protect our species, and why the choices that help most are also the ones that make us happier.

Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

How can your life be more gratifying?

We’ve become so focused on happiness and efficiency that we’ve forgotten how to enjoy the ordinary physical world. Gratification is everywhere—you just have to notice it. is a professor of computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design at Washington University in St. Louis. A contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, he explores how technology, media, and the ordinary objects of everyday life shape our experiences. Pick up a copy of his new book, The Small Stuff or check out his key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

What is your job for?

We’ve been taught to dream of jobs when what we’re really looking for is validation, purpose, and a lifestyle we actually enjoy. Getting ahead at work has a lot less to do with finding the perfect role and a lot more to do with knowing what you want, making your value visible, and remembering that your job is just what you do—not who you are.

Emily Durham, also known as Emily the Recruiter on social media, is a recruiter-turned-career coach with an audience of over three million people across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and her podcast. Pick up a copy of her new book Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind) 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:

Thomas Moore, The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity

Karen Korellis Reuther, Man-Made: How We Designed a World That Leaves Women Out, and How We Can Make It Right

Laura Mayer, Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out

Stephanie Romiszewski, Think Less, Sleep More: From Panic & Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep

Ian Bogost, The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life

The Big Idea: For most of history, old age was rare. Now it’s the norm, and that has reshaped who holds power, wealth, and opportunity in America. Without ever deciding to, we recreated humanity’s oldest political system: rule by elders.

Why It Matters: Americans under 40 hold less than 5 percent of the nation’s wealth. Those over 54 hold nearly 72 percent. The median primary voter is about 65. Our social contract was written for a world with far fewer old people and it’s due for a rewrite.

Try This Today: Look up the ages of your representative, your senators, and your mayor. Does the distribution of power look anything like the population it serves?

These ideas come from Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn. Sam is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Our deaths have been postponed.

You know the old song that says that only the good die young? Well, almost everyone in the United States—and in most other countries—dies old, whether they’re good or bad. With this extension of life, there are now political consequences.

It is revolutionary that most of us live long lives. There have always been old people, just not so many. A Psalm of the Bible says you get 70 or 80 years if you’re lucky, and that’s still basically true. We don’t know if the average can be pushed higher, though there are always some super agers in every generation. The novelty is that so many are living in old age.

Élie Metchnikoff was a Russian-born Nobel Prize winner in medicine who coined the term gerontology. He went on a trip to find aging Bulgarian shepherds who he thought knew the secret of long life. He assumed it was because they ate yogurt, which was first widely eaten in Southeastern Europe before it conquered our food ways, too. He went on to counsel that if you had your large intestine removed, you could survive even longer. He didn’t do it and died at 71 of heart failure, but a Scottish surgeon did try that tactic.

Our societies, thanks to contributions of life extenders, are now very different than past societies. In 1920, only five million Americans were 65 or older, which was less than five percent of the population. Now there are nearly 60 million, and that’s about 17 percent of the population.

2. Getting older means accumulating power.

Most people in most places for most of history have been governed by old men. Probably the central political institution that humans have devised to rule themselves is the council of elders. Even our sci-fi commonly includes them as a governing body. In The Matrix movie series, there’s a council of elders in the last human city, Zion. In the Superman comic books, there is a council of elders on the foreign planet that Clark Kent comes from.

There have been councils of elders throughout human history all over the world. The most famous is the Roman Senate, which influenced the founders of the United States. In American politics, the upper chamber of our legislature is called the Senate, which means the “chamber for old men.” Gerontocracy, rule by elders, is a blast from the past that we’ve reinvented thanks to the extension of life.

“Most people in most places for most of history have been governed by old men.”

Old-school gerontocracy was just about putting elders—the ones closest to our ancestors—in charge, very openly. In the modern world, power consists of getting elected and serving in political office, but that means the citizens doing the voting are in power, and our voters are getting older. In the modern world too, power means having money, including to pay for those candidates in elections. And our money in America is old.

3. How old are our politicians and voters?

Everyone knows that our presidents (especially the last two) are up there in years. In fact, they’re the oldest ever elected. And yet, it’s really in Congress where there are so many aging politicians, including ones even older than Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

The risk isn’t just cognitive decline but death on the job, which can have big consequences. The same is true in the judiciary, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at an advanced age with a lot of implications, including for abortion rights.

But everyone knows that we’ve got a problem in the United States with aging politicians. More deeply, and maybe more disturbingly, is how old the voting population is. The median age of Americans eligible to vote is 48 and rising, but actual voters are 52. If we exclude presidential elections, in which more people vote across generations, the median age of voters rises to about 55 or 56, and for some primaries, the median age is about 65. In New Mexico in 2024, the median age of voters was 71. Our voting population is heavily skewed toward older age groups.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

4. Who is wealthy in terms of money, employment, and housing?

We expect people to accumulate more as they age, but it was long expected that they would spend it at the end of their lives. But that’s not happening. The sheer proportion of our wealth that the aged control has reached staggering proportions.

In 2019, Americans under 40 (about 37 percent of the population) held only 4.9 percent of our wealth. Those over 54 (the same percentage of people) held 71.6 percent of the wealth. And it’s not just money. People are staying in jobs, whether that’s to make ends meet or because they want to, and that is creating pipeline and succession issues across many fields.

The best-funded lobby in world history is the American old folks’ lobby, the AARP. It successfully lobbied to end mandatory retirement. The consequences have been immense. Whether you look at CEOs or university professors, only a few professions like air traffic controllers or pilots are time-limited and age-limited. Supreme Court justices certainly aren’t. In fact, the Constitution says it can’t be age-limited.

“The best-funded lobby in world history is the American old folks’ lobby, the AARP.”

Then we look at housing, and an astonishing percentage of American housing stock is controlled by older people. That means our cities are graying because younger people, especially younger people with expensive families, can’t move into urban cores. Our whole lives together are being refashioned due to the aging of American society.

5. There’s hope for intergenerational rethinking.

I’m not against old people. I like them. I’m 54 years old, so, as my daughters always tell me, I’m one of them. And like everyone, I want to live as long as I can and enjoy the life I’ve been given for as long as I can. The question is about what’s fair.

In the U.S., we don’t have a very good welfare state for older people, especially when it comes to long-term care. Most people hoard or stash so many resources because they fear not having enough to live the very long lives that we now live. Of course, there are others who can’t imagine retiring because they’ve invested so much of their self-worth in their jobs and people are in love with the places where they live, their houses, even when others need those spaces.

There are many solutions for folks to consider. I’m trying to start a conversation, not end it. Whether it’s the age of politicians, the aging of the electorate, or the aging of wealth, I’ve got a list of possible fixes. It’s time to reimagine our social contract in a new situation in which there are so many more old people living so much longer.

The Big Idea: Therapy was designed to be something you graduate from, a tool for building agency to run your own life. But modern therapy culture has quietly inverted that mission: endless self-understanding has become a substitute for actual change, and a treatment meant to produce independence too often produces dependency instead.

Why It Matters: Therapy has never been more accessible, accepted, or destigmatized, and yet anxiety and depression rates remain stubbornly high. Meanwhile, clinical vocabulary has escaped the clinic: ordinary friction gets labeled “toxic”, and disappointing exes become “narcissists”. When every discomfort reads as damage, people get worse at the one skill mental health actually requires: moving through difficulty.

Try This Today: Take one conflict that’s been bothering you and ask the question good therapy always asks: What part might I be playing in this pattern? Sit with the answer before labeling the other person.

These ideas come from Therapy Nation: How America Got Hooked on Therapy and Why It’s Left Us More Anxious and Divided by Jonathan Alpert. Jonathan is a psychotherapist with two decades of clinical experience whose analysis has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and NBC Nightly News, and in The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. The rise of forever therapy.

More than a decade ago, I wrote a New York Times op-ed, “In Therapy Forever? Enough Already.” The argument was simple: therapy, as it was increasingly being practiced, was not helping patients move forward. In many cases, it kept them stuck.

I remember one new patient who captured the problem clearly. He had been in therapy for several years and was beginning to question whether it was helping. When he asked his therapist about spacing out sessions or trying a different approach, the response was immediate: “If you stop seeing me, you’ll get depressed.”

That wasn’t clinical judgment. It was a warning. And it worked.

What he had been offered as care had quietly become dependency. The message was not “you’re getting stronger.” It was “you can’t function without me.” That kind of framing doesn’t build resilience. It undermines it.

After hearing that story, and many others like it, it became difficult to ignore what was happening inside my own profession. A model of therapy that should have been oriented toward independence was, in too many cases, reinforcing reliance. Patients weren’t being helped to move through their problems. They were being conditioned to return to them, week after week.

From where I sat, this wasn’t a marginal issue. It was a shift in the culture of therapy itself. And in some cases, it wasn’t just failing to help people. It was making them worse.

That article served as inspiration for Therapy Nation. In the decade since it was published, the problems have only grown worse. Therapy has gone mainstream, becoming more culturally accepted, less stigmatized, and more widely accessible than ever before—all of which should have been good news. And yet, rates of anxiety and depression remained stubbornly high. The point of good therapy is to achieve growth, agency, and strength—not to endlessly dwell on our past and stay stuck. Somewhere along the way, therapy had become one of the only services people kept returning to without demanding results.

The pattern was familiar: patients would go in each week, vent about their frustrations, feel temporary relief, and return the next week to do it all over again. They felt better walking out of the office, only to fall back into the same arguments, avoidance, indecision, resentment, or fear as soon as real life resumed. The next session became another chance to unload rather than an opportunity to learn how to change anything.

“The point of good therapy is to achieve growth, agency, and strength.”

People began confusing length of treatment with depth, mistaking hours spent talking for proof that real change must be happening somewhere beneath the surface. While sessions continued, relationships went unaddressed, decisions were postponed, and ambitions stalled. The years people believed they were “working on themselves” were often the years they stopped fully living. The longer someone stayed in treatment, the harder it became to ask the most obvious question: Is this actually helping?

In some circles, long-term therapy has become a badge of sophistication, a signal of emotional seriousness and self-awareness. But sounding psychologically literate is not the same thing as growing. Endless introspection had taken on a kind of moral prestige that had little to do with actual change. And perhaps the most striking paradox: people became increasingly fluent in describing their own patterns, yet still avoided the hard conversation, the difficult decision, the necessary risk. Insight had become a substitute for change rather than a catalyst for it.

My critique of forever therapy had widened into an examination of how a therapeutic mindset was reshaping the culture itself, shaping how Americans argued, parented, dated, worked, and even voted. People increasingly approached ordinary life the way some long-term patients approached treatment: every setback needed interpretation, every difficult feeling demanded a backward search for origins.

That paradox became the foundation of Therapy Nation: how did a tool designed to restore agency weaken it? The answer lies in a culture that increasingly prefers endless understanding to difficult changes. Once that preference became normalized, forever therapy stopped being a clinical concern and became a national norm.

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2. How training programs lost the plot.

One of the most unsettling developments I’ve watched over the years is what’s happening inside therapy training itself. Graduate programs are increasingly producing not clinicians, but political activists with therapy licenses.

At its best, training demands that a therapist suspend judgment, resist the first satisfying explanation, and stay open to complexity. You are taught to be curious rather than certain, disciplined rather than reactive. To sit with a patient’s pain without immediately assigning blame. To challenge a narrative without abandoning compassion. That is what makes therapy work.

And it’s exactly what is now being lost. In too many places, students are taught a political lens before a clinical one, encouraged to interpret suffering first through identity, power, and oppression before ever examining agency, behavior, or the role a patient may be playing in the problem. Many young clinicians are primed to affirm rather than test, feeling compelled to view patients as either oppressed or oppressor, sorting by race, gender, and sexual orientation before they’ve fully understood the individual in front of them.

The therapist stops asking the most psychologically useful question: What part might you be playing in this pattern? And instead, begins reinforcing ready-made explanations that flatter the patient’s first interpretation. This robs therapy of its potential transformative power. Growth almost always requires some self-reckoning. It means asking whether our narratives are accurate, whether our grievances are exaggerated, and whether we are using ready-made explanations to avoid looking at our own patterns.

The profession has stopped asking: What is happening in your life, and how can we help you move forward? Instead, it now begins with a different question: Where do you fit in the hierarchy of power and oppression? Therapists trained to see people primarily through social justice categories can begin sorting patients into boxes from the start. Once that happens, therapy risks reinforcing identity scripts instead of helping people examine their own patterns, blind spots, and responsibility.

“Growth almost always requires some self-reckoning.”

The habits taught in graduate programs don’t stay in the classroom. They shape how millions of people will eventually understand their own conflicts, relationships, and suffering. A generation of clinicians trained to sort before they listen, to affirm before they examine, will produce a generation of patients who never learn to question their own narratives. When a helping profession teaches people to see themselves first as categories rather than individuals, the larger culture eventually begins to do the same.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

3. When politics entered the therapy room.

Politics has always shaped people’s stress, anxieties, family dynamics, and sense of safety. But in recent years, I began noticing politics is becoming the primary language through which many interpret their emotional world. Patients came in describing family conflict, friendship ruptures, workplace tension, and marital strain, only for those experiences to be filtered almost immediately through a political lens. A painful holiday dinner, a strained conversation with a parent, or a friendship under stress became proof that the other person was toxic, unsafe, irredeemable, or psychologically disordered because of how they voted.

People began cutting parents, siblings, friends, and even adult children out of their lives over politics, and on national television, so-called mental health experts openly advised them to do it, turning estrangement into a form of therapeutic wisdom. In some cases, therapists themselves refused to treat patients simply because of who they had voted for. Family bonds, long friendships, and years of shared history were suddenly reduced to a vote cast in November, without asking why the disagreement felt so threatening, whether older wounds were being stirred up, or whether the conflict reflected something deeper than politics. What might once have been approached as conflict to understand and work through was now increasingly framed as a mental health necessity.

Universities rolled out counseling resources, group processing sessions, and wellness programming as though the ordinary shock of an election result had become a mental health emergency. That response helped teach people to interpret political disagreement as personal harm and ideological difference as emotional danger. In many places, the message was unmistakable: political disappointment was something people needed therapy for to survive.

Therapy should be one of the places that helps people build that capacity, not lose it. Once people learn to interpret distress through ideological sorting, they begin applying the same habit to marriages, workplaces, friendships, and family systems. We need to get back to a culture where neighbors can disagree politically and remain friends, and where family and friendship are strong enough to outlast any political cycle. The ability to tolerate disagreement, question first impressions, and resist turning every conflict into a moral referendum is essential for a functioning society. We are losing it.

4. How therapy-speak took over culture.

Therapy-speak has escaped the clinic and lost much of its meaning. Words like toxic, gaslighting, boundaries, trauma, and narcissism were developed as clinical tools. In everyday conversation and on social media, they’ve been weaponized, used to win arguments, avoid criticism, and cast ordinary conflict as abuse. The result is that ordinary life begins to feel more pathological than it really is, and people become more likely to interpret frustration, conflict, or personality differences as signs of diagnosis rather than normal human experience.

A disappointing friend is called toxic. A selfish ex becomes a narcissist. A misunderstanding at work turns into gaslighting. An uncomfortable request becomes a boundary violation. A painful memory becomes trauma. These words were originally useful because they described serious, specific patterns, but when they become shorthand for every unpleasant experience, they stop clarifying reality and start distorting it.

Once therapy-speak becomes the dominant way people narrate relationships, the threshold for what counts as ordinary friction is reduced dramatically. Everyday disagreement starts to feel dangerous. Ambiguity feels intolerable. Every conflict is problematic. There is something particularly corrosive about vocabulary that makes people feel more sophisticated while actually making them less accurate.

“Everyday disagreement starts to feel dangerous.”

Patients often arrive with polished stories already built around therapy-speak: they know who the villain is and have the vocabulary to frame themselves as harmed. Clinical language, when misused, gives people a sophisticated language for grievance without any framework for resolution. Once someone decides whether a friend is toxic or a partner is a narcissist, the label itself shuts down any alternative explanation. The conversation is over before it begins.

One of the clearest signs of this shift is how often the phrase “my therapist says” now functions as the ultimate conversation-ender. It gets repeated almost like a moral trump card, a way of shutting down disagreement by borrowing the authority of therapy itself. Part of what makes this language so seductive is that it offers immediate validation. But when a culture mistakes validation for progress, emotional comfort can quietly replace the harder work of self-examination.

The healthier use of psychological language is not to turn ordinary life into pathology, but to clarify genuine patterns that help people respond more effectively. Used carefully, these words can deepen insight and strengthen relationships. Used casually, they trap people inside distorted narratives and keep them stuck. Good therapy sharpens perception. Therapy culture, at its worst, can blur it.

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. The pathologizing of ordinary life.

The final and perhaps deepest consequence of therapy culture is the way it has encouraged us to reinterpret ordinary life through the lens of pathology. Every generation has had language for suffering, but what feels different now is how quickly normal human experiences are elevated into symptoms, syndromes, or psychological injuries.

Everyday disappointment becomes trauma. A difficult boss becomes abusive. A moody teenager is labeled disordered. A breakup becomes evidence of emotional damage. Ordinary anxiety becomes proof that something is wrong. This shift may seem compassionate on the surface—and that’s precisely what makes it so costly.

The more we pathologize normal life, the less prepared people become to handle it. Life is filled with discomfort. Rejection, frustration, uncertainty, heartbreak, and criticism are not signs of dysfunction. They’re very much a part of life. They are also the raw materials from which resilience, maturity, and growth occur.

When culture teaches people to interpret these experiences primarily as threats to mental health, something essential begins to disappear: frustration tolerance. People become more vigilant toward discomfort and less willing to ask what discomfort might be teaching them. The issue is whether we are helping people become stronger in the face of life’s inevitable difficulties or whether we are unintentionally training them to experience more of life as dangerous.

“The more we pathologize normal life, the less prepared people become to handle it.”

Some of the most important capacities we develop as adults come from learning that we can survive what we do not like. We survive embarrassment. We survive disappointment. We survive being misunderstood, criticized, rejected, or uncertain about what comes next. Those experiences are how character is built. When therapy culture encourages people to monitor themselves too closely for signs of injury, it can accidentally make those ordinary experiences feel more destabilizing than they need to be.

Real mental health is not the absence of pain. It is the ability to move through pain and the ability to separate temporary discomfort from actual damage. The future of mental health depends on helping people recover a basic truth: discomfort is often the beginning of growth, not a sign that something has gone wrong.

Feeling understood is not the same as getting better. Modern mental health culture has drifted toward treating validation as progress, but real progress is often uncomfortable. The hopeful alternative is courage: a vision of mental health grounded in greater capacity, not the avoidance of discomfort. The real measure of growth is not how well someone can describe their wounds, but how confidently they can move through the difficulties that every meaningful life will encounter. That is what allows people to truly flourish.

The Big Idea: Vaccination is one of the greatest acts of collective kindness humans have ever devised, a technology that only works because we agree to protect people we’ll never meet. But the very success of vaccines has created a new problem: we’ve forgotten why we need them.

Why It Matters: Before vaccines, one in three children died of infectious disease before age five; burying a child was a routine part of parenthood. That memory has vanished within two generations, and into the vacuum have rushed claims that the shot is more dangerous than the microbe. The consequences are no longer hypothetical: American infants are now dying of a preventable vitamin K deficiency because a benign newborn injection got swept up in anti-vaccine misinformation.

These ideas come from A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines by Thomas Levenson. Tom is a professor of science writing at MIT and the author of several books, including So Very Small, Money for Nothing, and Einstein in Berlin. He has also made 10 award-winning feature-length documentaries. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

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1. Vaccines are kindness in a syringe.

None of the characters in the first passage of my book has a name. They were all anonymized (rightly so) as participants in an early-stage clinical trial. 108 healthy adults had agreed to allow researchers to inject them with a new compound that hadn’t been tried on humans before.

12 went first—guinea pigs willing to risk unanticipated consequences. They and the other study participants then stuck with it through a lengthy nine-month protocol, all to test a candidate vaccine to protect against human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, the pathogen that causes AIDS. Those unnamed, unknown volunteers lent their bodies and time to a project that could potentially save millions of others from a scourge that no one in this original cohort was facing themselves.

Such courage shoots through the long history of vaccination. That group of people willing to put themselves on the line to help humans they will never meet remind us that the story of vaccines is a tale of kindness—and of one of the best of human qualities: a willingness to take a chance in the hope of defeating persistent and deadly foes.

2. Not all vaccine hesitation is created equal.

Some people in the anti-vaccine world are in it for the money, power, and clout they can gain from pushing repeatedly debunked claims about the hazards of vaccines. But over the long history of vaccine development, some fears were not crazy. In one of the most significant incidents, there was a brief period in the 19th century when the first versions of the smallpox vaccine accidentally transmitted syphilis rather than the benign cowpox virus that conferred immunity to smallpox. Those incidents were rare, but one is too many if it happens to you.

News of such cases outraged and terrified many people, and some of the responses to those fears were not particularly helpful to the pro-vaccine cause. Some defenders then, and still today, argued that the obvious overwhelming benefits of the smallpox vaccine as a shield against one of the most terrifying killers of the day justified ignoring those alarmed by the small but real risk of a loathsome, deadly disease. In the end, such easy dismissals led to anger among those afraid of the new procedure—and those grievances sparked riots in the streets.

“Some of the responses to those fears were not particularly helpful to the pro-vaccine cause.”

If people are concerned about a shot—even if it’s just the worry produced by all the noise from anti-vaccine voices—it doesn’t work to fall back on the (valid) cost-benefit statistics of vaccination. Instead, it’s vital to identify the roots of someone’s hesitation and tell the whole story—way back to syphilis and smallpox, if necessary—to address the fear behind the fear: a deeply human concern about sticking some invisible and potent substance into one’s body.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

3. It’s crucial—and difficult—to remember a past beyond lived experience.

Modern anti-vaccine activists are as adamant as their 19th-century predecessors about the allegedly fatal dangers of vaccines. For example, before Robert F. Kennedy became Health and Human Services Secretary, he asserted that kids “get the shot, that night they have a fever…and three months later their brain is gone.”

Kennedy was wrong, of course. The alleged connection between vaccines and brain injury has been repeatedly debunked and modern vaccines are the safest medical procedures available today. But when Kennedy and his allies assert that vaccines are terribly dangerous and riskier than any conceivable benefit they might convey, that sense of danger can come to seem plausible—because of what we no longer recall.

Before vaccines existed, one in three kids would die of a fever before the age of five. It was routine for parents to bury one or more of their children. But with the steady expansion of vaccines for previously unchecked diseases in the 20th century, childhood infectious illnesses in rich countries have been almost completely defeated. A single kid’s death from measles is so rare that when one does happen, it makes national news.

“Modern vaccines are the safest medical procedures available today.”

That triumph has made it easy for opponents to claim that a shot is far more dangerous than any seemingly negligible threat posed by some invisible microbe. That false narrative is persuasive only because the genuine and vast peril posed by pathogenic viruses and bacteria has been defeated by vaccines. Such amnesia defines the job for the historian. Memory is not automatic. It must be cultivated, sought out.

4. When we forget what our grandparents knew about infectious disease, tragedy follows.

In 1857, a senior British doctor, Sir John Simon, defended vaccine mandates when he wrote that vaccine opponents were prepared to risk allowing “unconscious infants to become the prey of a fatal and mutilative disease.” Then, unleashing the most memorable phrase in the history of vaccination, he named the crime thus committed: “It was this liberty of omissional infanticide which the law took courage to check.”

“Omissional infanticide”—murder, with the lethal weapon being inaction: the withholding of the procedure that could have saved babies from dying from a preventable disease. What’s frustrating, terrifying, and tragic about what Simon said nearly two centuries ago is that his indictment still holds. As I write this, news has broken of infants dying in the U.S. from Vitamin K deficiency bleeding disorder (VKDB). About one in 250 babies is at risk of the malady, and the resulting deaths are wholly avoidable.

It’s standard practice to give newborns an injection of vitamin K right after they’ve made their entrance. But increasingly, American parents are rejecting that shot. It’s not a vaccine—the immune system isn’t involved—but because a needle is involved, this utterly benign bit of prophylaxis has been swept up in the cacophony of anti-vax misinformation. Parents become persuaded that they’re avoiding an unnecessary medical procedure and then expose their children to potentially fatal harm.

“This utterly benign bit of prophylaxis has been swept up in the cacophony of anti-vax misinformation.”

The same thing happens when people reject the standard—and transformative—suite of vaccines against the once ubiquitous and often lethal suite of childhood diseases: diphtheria, pertussis, measles, and the rest. Omissional infanticide, indeed.

5. Vaccination and the kind of people we want to be.

Our choices about vaccination hold up a mirror to who we are or want to be, as individuals and a society. Every decision to vaccinate begins with self-interest; the calculation that the benefit of avoiding an illness or the worst of an infection outweighs the slight risks of getting a shot.

We bare our arms because the prospect of a sore shoulder is worth it to avoid an encounter with anything from COVID to mumps to yellow fever or measles. That’s the “profit” we gain in thinking of a vaccination as a purely private transaction.

But another way to understand our choices recognizes the possibility of both generosity and individual gain. Seen that way, vaccines against the common endemic diseases confer a benefit that is shared with everyone around us. At the population level, a high enough vaccine rate stops infectious diseases cold by making it impossible for a single case to spread into an epidemic. Sitting still for each of the jabs on the recommended list gives our neighbors an amount of security that none of us can secure for ourselves alone.

To be against vaccination is to isolate oneself, to be alone, and to reject the ties that could bind one to others. You, me, all of us don’t have to live that way. Recognizing the gift inherent in the choice to vaccinate demonstrates that there is another way to be: in the company of others, mindful of ourselves as they each are of themselves, and generous to them as they are to us.

Why It Matters: The idea that loyalty and hard work lead to security and advancement is out of date, but most of us act as if it still applies. To have the career you want, you need to learn how the game actually works.

These ideas come from Clock In: No-BS Advice for Getting Ahead in Your Career (Without Losing Your Mind) by Emily Durham. Emily, known online as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter-turned-career coach with an audience of more than three million across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and her podcast. Read on for five of her big ideas.

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1. Forget a dream job. Why are you dreaming of work?

Many of us made pretty big decisions about our careers before we could even vote or order a beer. And yet, at the ripe age of 17, we were forced to pick an academic and professional path. I surely do not trust any decision 17-year-old me made, but here we are.

From the time we could read, we were asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. And often, the jobs we dreamed of were the jobs that we knew existed, that we saw ourselves represented in, or had education about. The dream job often isn’t our dream alone.

What you want in your career has largely been shaped by your environment, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s so much power in understanding that what we have always wanted and what we will want in the future may evolve alongside our environment, circumstances, and sense of self. And there’s even more power in bringing awareness to some of these self-beliefs and giving ourselves a chance to challenge them.

The worst thing you can do is be married to a path that one day may no longer be the path you want. Your career will become significantly less stressful once you detach your sense of self from your work. Because as much as our careers feel like an integral part of who we are, they’re just what we do. Although they influence us as people, they aren’t who we are at our core.

“There’s so much power in understanding that what we have always wanted and what we will want in the future may evolve.”

And because we’ve been conditioned to dream of labor—literally, it is so gross—we think we’re targeting a dream job alone. When the reality is that most of us are targeting these three core needs, and the job is just how we plan to get there.

As people, we are fueled by my Jersey Shore-style acronym, VPL: Validation, Purpose, and Lifestyle. If we stop targeting a dream job and start targeting a life that gives us the VPL we’re looking for, things start to feel just a little bit lighter.

2. Your job is never loving you back—like, ever.

Have you heard of love bombing? In short, it’s when someone tries to shower you with love and affection and praise super early on in a relationship so that you feel valued and ultimately really loyal to them. Eventually, once the love bomber gets what they want—often your unwavering devotion—they pull back and withdraw the positive affirmations and attentiveness they used to hook you.

Companies kind of do the same thing. They know humans have a desire to feel valued, so what do they do? They manufacture a sense of belonging in exchange for our loyalty. You’ll hear things like, “We’re a family at this company,” or “We’re the good guys.” Eventually, we start to believe them. We feel a heightened sense of responsibility and anxiety. We work late, we don’t ask for a raise—all to avoid letting the company that we love down.

But the truth is, it’s hard to get ahead without losing your mind when you’re expecting your company to love you back. You start to work overtime, lose sleep, and go above and beyond for a company that will pass you up for a promotion or lay you off if necessary. You may love your job, but much like my ex-boyfriend, that job is never loving you back. Ever.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

3. Your resume doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to not be bad.

With thousands of applications for every single job, how does a recruiter get through them all and read them all? On average, a recruiter looks at your resume for six seconds before they determine whether they move forward with you as a candidate.

Only six seconds. How are they reading everything you wrote down in that short a time? I have big news: they’re not. Baby, they’re not reading your resume at all. The average recruiter is skimming, not reading. So, your resume doesn’t need to be AI-proof or perfectly laid out to get ahead. It just can’t be bad.

“Baby, they’re not reading your resume at all.”

If your resume isn’t bad, then it’s good. If we know recruiters are skimming your resume, all we need to do is make sure the design, data, and details of your application align with how real recruiters review applications to get you ahead.

So please do not feel like you need to customize your resume. It is totally unnecessary. You don’t need to do it. You also don’t need to flood your resume with a whole bunch of buzzwords directly from the job description. All of that advice doesn’t actually help.

All you need to do is have one really strong resume that’s loaded with meaningful data that explains in detail the value and impact of your job, with a design that’s simple and easy to read. No crazy colors, no crazy design—something that a human person can scan easily in under six seconds, ideally.

4. Be liked and seen.

Have you ever noticed it’s almost never the smartest or most qualified person who gets the job or the promotion? It’s the most visible and the most well-liked. If you have limited time to invest in your career, I would genuinely rather you invest it in improving your likability and visibility than in your actual intellect and skill. And believe me, I know that’s messed up.

The ugly truth is that meritocracy is a myth. People are not hired, paid, and promoted based on skill, talent, and hard work. Of course, those things can be factors in success, and they often are. But in a world based on racism, capitalism, sexism, and every other “ism,” merit alone isn’t going to grow your career.

Ask yourself:

• Does my boss know what I’m working on?

• Is what I’m working on visible to senior leadership?

• Is the impact of what I’m doing visible to senior leadership?

• Do people like me?

• Do I make people feel valued and understood?

• Do I operate with empathy?

If the answer is yes, you’re light-years ahead.

This edition of Book of the Day is sponsored by Shopify. Stop waiting for permission to build something. Your next revenue stream starts free at shopify.com/nbi

5. Be a little bit crazy.

I’ve seen this happen countless times with my clients. They do all the right things. They make a plan. They network. They develop their skills. And they’re passed up for opportunities, or they’re told to wait it out by a boss who clearly doesn’t have their best interests at heart. Sometimes this is because the work culture is toxic—that’s a whole other can of worms—but sometimes it’s because you need to be just a tiny bit crazier, also known as being a better salesperson.

Operating with a sales mindset in your career is literally life-changing. It doesn’t mean that you’re pushy or that you never take no for an answer, because that isn’t what great salespeople do. They don’t steamroll, get in your face, or force you to buy what they’re selling. What they are is consistent. Great salespeople aren’t scared to get creative and be persistent to get the job done. So, I challenge you to start thinking about your career through the lens of a salesperson.

Many salespeople live by the “rule of seven.” It’s a sales and marketing term that states a customer needs to interact with a brand seven times before they make a purchasing decision. This might mean a person sees two commercials on TV, sees an ad on the subway, sees a sponsored post on social media, gets a call from the sales team, hears a radio ad, and receives an email from the same sales rep they’ve been working with—all before they even decide to purchase the product.

“Operating with a sales mindset in your career is literally life-changing.”

Good salespeople know that asking you to purchase a product once just isn’t going to cut it. They need to influence you again and again. Think of your career as the product and your boss as the consumer. Your boss needs consistent and clear messaging that politely reminds them what you want. It’s as simple as that.

You asking for growth once isn’t enough. You need to have conversations about your ideal next career move at least once a month. Look for those opportunities to socialize your desires regularly. And don’t get discouraged if it takes a little bit of time.

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

Psychology & Health

• Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health by Trevor Harley. View on Amazon

• The 12 Levers: The Complete Psychological Toolkit For Improving Your Life by Spencer Greenberg & Jeremy Stevenson. View on Amazon

• The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost. View on Amazon

• Think Less, Sleep More: From Panic & Perfectionism to Stress-Free Sleep by Stephanie Romiszewski. View on Amazon

• Why We Fight: A Transformative Road Map to Healing Conflict in Any Relationship by Kim Polinder. View on Amazon

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Career & Motivation

• You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life by Cate Hall. View on Amazon

• Easy Discipline: An Unconventional Way to Achieve Ambitious Things by Jia Jiang. View on Amazon

• The Price of Becoming: The Compounding Practices of High Performance by Ryan Hawk. View on Amazon

• Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out by Laura Mayer. View on Amazon

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Memoir & Culture

• The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Cal Flyn. View on Amazon

• The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin. View on Amazon

• The Cure at Walden Pond: A Guide to Recovering Our Humanity by Thomas Moore. View on Amazon

• Unsayable: A Life in Writing by Michael Cunningham. View on Amazon

Read on for the rest of the list…

Read more

Tomorrow, the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, and as much as we like a good party, milestones like this are also an important time to take stock. So how are we doing, America? This week, we heard from authors who looked back at the nation’s origins and ahead to its uncertain future. And while the verdict may be mixed, these big thinkers all agree that the country’s story is still being written.

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This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Are you in the mood to celebrate America’s 250th birthday?

“We’re entering our 250th birthday, and we’re not quite in the mood for a birthday party. We’ve been tearing ourselves apart.” That’s what told Rufus when they sat down last year. But, he says, it doesn’t have to be that way. “Let’s use this birthday party as a chance to try to heal some of the divides.”

Walter’s latest book is The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. That sentence? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Yes, it’s eloquent, but more than that, it gave the United States a mission statement, one that we are still striving — fitfully, imperfectly — to meet. With America’s 250th birthday just a few days away, we think it’s the perfect time to revisit this conversation with Walter about how that sentence came to be written, what it meant to the founders, and why it still matters today. Check out our conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or watch it on YouTube.

Book Bite of the Week

Can AI save democracy?

Just seven percent of young Americans see our democracy as healthy. Political violence is on the rise, and people are more willing to marry someone of another religion than another political party. Enter AI. Recent headlines warn of brain fry from AI use and an AI apocalypse on par with nuclear war. It could seem we are living in the worst of times. But Beth Simone Noveck has spent the last three years building AI tools with students and communities, and those results and victories paint an encouraging, though cautious, picture of AI’s possibilities.

Beth has worked on and written about how we solve our hardest problems from the White House to 10 Downing Street to the German Chancellery and served as New Jersey’s first Chief AI Strategist. She is also a professor at Northeastern University. Pick up a copy of her new book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy or check out her key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

Is the American Revolution over yet?

The American Revolution remains unfinished. The fragile experiment launched in 1776 now confronts transformative political, economic, and technological forces that raise urgent questions about the future of the Republic. Jonathan Turley is a professor at George Washington University Law School, litigator, and legal analyst. His new book is Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. Pick up a copy on Amazon or listen to his 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:
Julia Angwin & , On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
Lixing Sun, On the Origin of Sex: The Weird and Wonderful Science of Reproduction

The Big Idea: America isn’t defined by a settled identity, it’s defined by an ongoing argument over what it should become, an argument that’s played out in speeches since before the Constitution existed.

Why It Matters: The country’s sharpest political fights right now aren’t new disagreements. They’re the same argument about national identity that’s run since 1787, just with new technology amplifying it.

These ideas come from All We Say: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches by Ben Rhodes. Ben is the author of the bestsellers After the Fall and The World as It Is, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, a contributor for MS NOW, and a former deputy national security advisor and speechwriter to President Barack Obama. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. American identity has never been a settled question.

We have been having an argument about what it means to be American ever since our founding 250 years ago. That argument has taken many different forms and addressed many different issues, but there have always been essentially two opposing stories about being American.

One of the two stories views America as inherently right from the beginning. As JD Vance recently put it, “We are not a nation devoted to a creed, but rather a particular land claimed by a particular people with a particular way of life.” At the beginning, this was white Christian settlers who formed the class of people who controlled the government, the land, and the capital. Over time, people of different backgrounds were permitted to participate in this project so long as they accepted their subordination to America’s original identity. As inheritors of a Western civilization and sense of supremacy, this exclusive American identity has also tended to view criticism of America as ungrateful or unpatriotic.

On the other hand, there’s a story that views American identity as a struggle to live up to an unkept promise, the creed written into the Declaration of Independence: a multiracial democracy founded on the idea of human equality. The struggle to live up to that idea is what has allowed the United States to abolish slavery, welcome immigrants, and extend rights and opportunity to more people. It’s a story that finds strength in diversity. And because of the self-criticism it requires, this more malleable form of American identity views self-criticism as the highest form of patriotism, and mirrors the ethos of self-improvement that we associate with the American dream.

Spoiler alert: we’re neither one story nor the other. We have always been both, and the ways in which those two stories mixed have shaped who we are. The reason our politics has become so contested and contentious in recent years is because we’re dealing with big questions about the fundamental purpose of our union and national identity. That has once again become the battleground.

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2. Speeches offer a fresh lens on history.

In a democracy, a speech is the purest form of persuasion. You need to stand in front of a group of people and convince them to believe something or to do something. And the words spoken by Americans have mattered a lot. The 15 speeches I chose for this book are not necessarily the greatest hits, but rather they are speeches that have been about this question of identity. These speeches have helped spark movements or elect presidents; start wars or forged peace. Often, they reinterpreted or sometimes even reinvented the past. Some of them even foretold the future. Some of these are speeches you’ve heard of, like Lincoln’s second inaugural address or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but some of them have been lost to history. But when you go back and read them, you see how they entered our national subconscious.

What makes a speech matter? A speech has to be authentic. The speaker should be the only person able to deliver it. What is said matters, but why it’s being said matters even more. For each speech in the book, I spend time with the life story of the speaker to understand where their voice came from, what experiences shaped them, and what their motivation was to take a stand.

I believe the alchemy of democracy is the interaction between movements and power, and each speech in my book emerges out of a particular movement for racial or gender equality, for state’s rights or white supremacy, for immigration or nativism, for a race to the future or return to the past. So, for each speech, I also spent time with the movements that made the words possible.

How Americans speak has changed with technology. In the days of our founding, a speaker would only be heard by the people in the room, and the words would then be disseminated by newspapers. This favored carefully constructed arguments. In the 19th century, when a speaking circuit emerged, performance started to matter. Politics merged with popular culture. Then radio made it possible to reach a mass audience, which favored plain-spoken explanation. Then television elevated setting, spectacle, and charisma. Then the internet and social media built online community and prized virality.

So, in place of storytelling, now, as anyone with a phone knows, moments start to matter more than stories. And precisely because we live in a time when speeches have receded from the discourse, it’s a valuable time to understand our history through them because they show the changing ways in which Americans have made arguments and told stories about who we are.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

3. The compromises made at the dawn of American identity.

The book begins with Benjamin Franklin’s closing argument at the Constitutional Convention. It’s a wonderful speech filled with humor and the wisdom gained over Franklin’s extraordinary life. Remarkably, he says almost nothing about the Constitution itself. His entire argument is about the virtue of compromise, which was required to create a union among 13 states with different interests, different people, and different ways of life.

Viewed from one perspective, that compromise created one of the most successful constitutions in history, a political system and nation that would grow into one of the strongest in history.

From a different perspective, the compromises glossed over fundamental questions: the future of slavery, the role of immigration, the way our nation would grow and govern an increasingly large and diverse geography and population. Precisely because speeches are in the present tense, you can see that people knew all of this at the time. Franklin knew. That’s why one of the first public actions he took after the Constitution was to petition Congress to abolish slavery.

The second speech in my book is by Red Jacket, a Seneca chief who spoke viscerally about how Native peoples were excluded and threatened by the new nation. The third is by Maria Stewart, an impoverished black woman who demanded abolition and the empowerment of African Americans and women. The fourth is Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who declared white supremacy to be the cornerstone of his new nation. And then the fifth is by Abraham Lincoln, who radically sought to usher in a second founding of the United States in his second inaugural address.

And on and on it goes from there. Americans have always known that who we are is not a settled matter. Compromise made the United States possible, but it also set in motion all the arguments that were to come.

4. American identity has been shaped by movements.

Movements and their backlashes remade the nation in ways that weren’t apparent at the time. At the height of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass spoke on behalf of radical Republicans. He defended Chinese immigration as both just and inevitable if America was to truly become a multiracial democracy. On the surface, Douglass failed. Reconstruction was soon over. Segregation was in place. An exclusion act slammed the door on Chinese immigration. Viewed from today, however, Douglass’ words were prescient. They entered the American subconscious. Look at our demographics. Look at the type of our nation today. It’s a lot more like the nation Douglass described than his opponents would have wished for at the time.

Or consider Mary Elizabeth Lease. She was a Kansas populist. I found a speech in which she excoriated a country ruled by and for Wall Street. She called for what we could see as a left-wing economic program while embracing a right-wing form of identity politics: the political reconciliation of the white working class, a nativist approach to race and immigration. Her words anticipated the Progressive Era of the early 20th century. They also anticipated Donald Trump.

And then there’s Martin Luther King. His speech at the March on Washington helped force the issue of civil rights onto the national agenda in ways that led to the end of segregation. That movement remade America. It also sparked a backlash—a conservative counter-revolution that has continued to this day.

The book ends with consecutive speeches by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump. It’s a dizzying ride. Each one of these presidents built a movement that was, in many ways, a response to the previous one. What separates Trump and makes this moment different is the message in his second inaugural address, which ends my book. In it, he basically declares that American identity is embodied in him. So, he doesn’t need to follow the same rules as everybody else. Those who disagree are not opponents, they’re enemies. But just like all the other speeches, Trump’s is not going to be the last word.

5. We need to recover storytelling through speeches.

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, America has always contained multitudes for good and bad, and the passage of time does not inevitably bring progress. Yes, the United States has grown bigger, richer, and more powerful, but that success does not mean that we’ve inexorably become better.

Indeed, the most powerful words spoken by Americans highlight the gap between who we are and who we aspire to be and demand that we close that gap. We live in a cynical time. If you’re like me, you can feel like you’re surrounded by forces that you lack any control over. There’s an algorithm that shapes what you see on your phone. There’s a bunch of oligarchs that seem to control all wealth and power. The old order is unraveling internationally. Artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs. It seems like there’s corruption everywhere. Truth itself is distorted or contested. But that’s why we so desperately need to find words that will help us understand why and how America can move in a new direction.

When we lack a shared national identity, we need storytelling: speeches that reimagine what binds us together. When people are being demoralized by cynicism and apathy, they need someone to stand in front of a crowd and tell them why what is happening matters and what we can do to make things change.

The Big Idea: For decades, researchers studying sun exposure were trying to prove a simple point: more sun, more skin cancer. They were right — but in tracking that risk, they stumbled onto something much bigger. People who got more sunlight had dramatically lower rates of heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, and dementia — diseases that kill far more people than skin cancer ever does. The light we’ve spent decades trying to avoid may be one of the most underrated levers we have for long-term health.

Why It Matters: Most of us spend close to 23 hours a day indoors, lit by bulbs and screens that deliver a fraction of natural light’s brightness and almost none of its spectrum. Our bodies evolved to run on full daylight, and they don’t fully recognize the substitute. The fix isn’t complicated, but it does mean rethinking a decade of “stay out of the sun” advice that doesn’t account for the bigger picture.

Try This Today: Step outside for 10–15 minutes of direct sunlight before 10 a.m. — no sunscreen needed for that short a window for most skin tones — and notice how it shifts your alertness for the rest of the morning.

These ideas come from In Defense of Sunlight: The Surprising Science of Sun Exposure by Rowan Jacobsen. Rowan is an award-winning science writer whose work has appeared in prominent publications and has been anthologized in The Best American Science & Nature Writing. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. Light leads to long life.

A few decades ago, several studies around the world started tracking the amount of sunlight that people were exposed to. The goal was to prove that sun exposure raised the risk of skin cancer. In the old days, they did this through questionnaires and latitude, because the farther you are from the equator, the less light you get on average. Today, they use NASA satellite data or attach light-sensing watches to volunteers’ wrists. The evidence consistently showed that sun exposure does raise the risk of skin cancer.

That wasn’t a surprise. What was surprising was what else it showed: People who got a lot of sun exposure were much healthier than those who didn’t, and they were less likely to die. The biggest difference was in cardiovascular disease, including heart attacks and strokes, which were less common among the sun-getters. They also had lower rates of many cancers and autoimmune diseases, as well as diabetes and dementia. Because those diseases combined kill hundreds of times more people than skin cancer, which is rarely fatal, the overall health and longevity of the sun-getters was much higher. It’s now well established that sunlight corresponds to good health. The question, of course, is why.

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2. Light is physical.

The secret to understanding the benefits of sunlight is to change how you think about light. To most of us, it’s not quite physical. Matter is real, but light is just background, the stage setting against which the drama of existence unfolds. But any quantum physicist would tell you that nothing could be further from the truth. Light is as real as any atom. It’s pure energy, pouring out of the sun in tiny packets called photons that find their way to Earth eight minutes later.

Once light gets here, it has a huge effect on the atoms it meets, especially the ones in your body. When a molecule absorbs a photon of light, it becomes energized and starts behaving differently. It can bond with other atoms to form new molecules, break apart, or vibrate like a bell, sending a signal to the rest of the body.

The effect depends on how much energy the photon carries. Photons come in a wide range of energy levels and wavelengths, and we detect those differences as colors. Ultraviolet light has the most energy, blue and green are in the middle, and red and infrared photons have the least energy. The important thing to remember is that they are all contained in sunlight, which you can think of as a kind of multivitamin.

Because of these differences in energy, each color of light affects different molecules in the body. Ultraviolet light can damage DNA, but it also makes vitamin D, an essential hormone, and nitric oxide, which lowers blood pressure. Blue light increases alertness and cognition. Green light soothes us. Infrared light scatters through the entire body, improving metabolism and accelerating healing. The body depends on the full spectrum of light to achieve its daily tasks and to keep track of where it is in the day/night cycle. Without that dose, it can lose its way.

3. We are designed for sunlight.

A big reason for poor health in industrial societies is because our diets have changed radically from what we are meant to eat. When humans evolved in Africa, there were no ultra-processed snacks or fast food. We can get by for a short time on such unhealthy fare, but our well-being ultimately depends on sticking with the whole foods we ate in pre-industrial times.

The same is true of light. Although we rarely think about it, our modern lightscape bears even less resemblance to ancient norms than our modern diet. We spend, on average, about 23 hours per day indoors, bathed in artificial light. The photons emanating from LED bulbs and screens are unlike anything we ever experienced in the ancient past. The brightness is only about one percent of the brightness of sunlight, and large portions of the solar spectrum are missing entirely. It’s essentially junk light.

The result is that we spend almost all our time in light that our bodies and minds don’t recognize as daylight, and we never truly wake up. We just wander through our days like zombies, in what the chronobiology experts call “biological darkness.” The negative impact on our health can be severe. But the solution is very simple: Get sun. Not too much. Go outside.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

4. Everybody’s different.

How much sunlight should you get? There is no simple answer. We’re all different. Everybody has unique needs, depending on who they are, where they are, and what time of year it is.

The most important factor is skin tone. People with very fair skin, who easily burn and never tan, are much more susceptible to skin cancer, and they need to be very cautious about sun exposure. They’re the ones the recommendations are written for. But people with very dark skin have virtually no risk of sun-induced skin cancer. For them, a daily dose of sunlight is just what the doctor ordered. People with intermediate skin tones can benefit greatly from small amounts of sunlight, while taking care never to burn.

In addition, where you live greatly affects your sun diet. People in Australia tend to get too much, while people in Minnesota struggle to get enough much of the year. Other factors like diet and exercise also influence sun tolerance. Most people have a pretty good sense when they’ve had too much. The trick is to err on the side of safety and to never lie out on the beach all day. You are not a lizard.

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5. You are energy.

The more I began to think about the way the energy from light cascades through the body, the more I began to think of us as tai chi masters, channeling that energy into our molecules and bending it into patterns that flow through the body and maintain good health. Then, I suddenly realized that I had the metaphor all wrong. We’re not the tai chi masters. We’re the energy!

The essence of a river is not the rocks and dirt of the riverbed. It’s not even the individual drops of water, which are constantly changing. It’s the standing wave, the flow. And you, too, are the standing wave of energy flowing through the substrate of your cells. Every action that makes you alive, whether it’s moving or thinking or healing, is a pattern of energy that began as light from the sun, which either found its way into a plant and then into you or entered you directly. And you depend on constant infusions of that energy to keep the flow, and the fun, going.

Keeping all that in mind can help take away some unnecessary fear and maybe even put an extra spring in your step the next time you step out into the light. Which I hope you’ll do soon.

The Big Idea: Midlife isn’t a slow fade — it’s the biological and behavioral moment that quietly sets the terms for everything that comes after.

Why It Matters: For decades, middle age has been framed as either a crisis or a punchline. Meanwhile, researchers have been quietly accumulating something more valuable: data. Brandeis psychologist Margie Lachman has spent over 30 years following thousands of American adults through midlife and beyond, and what she’s found cuts against the cultural narrative. How old you feel, how much you move, how well you sleep, and how connected you are in your 40s and 50s are strong predictors of later-life health. Midlife isn’t a holding pattern, it’s the leverage point.

Try This Today: Calculate your “subjective age”: ask yourself how old you feel on a typical day — then notice whether that number is running ahead of or behind your birth certificate, and what’s driving the gap.

These ideas come from Primetime: A New Vision for Midlife by Margie Lachman. Margie is a professor of psychology at Brandeis University and a lead investigator on the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study, which has tracked thousands of adults for over 30 years to map the pathways to health and well-being across the life span. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Midlife is a pivotal period in the life course.

Whenever I tell someone I study midlife, the first question is, “When is midlife?” The 30- and 40-somethings wonder, “Am I considered middle-aged?” Those in their 60s and 70s wonder whether they still qualify. The heart of midlife is the 40s and 50s, but the broader range is 40 to 60, plus or minus 10. That’s because many people in their 30s and 60s think of themselves as middle-aged. Subjective age, or how old one feels, is important to consider because it is closely associated with health and well-being. In the large national longitudinal study Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), which I have worked on for over 30 years, we found that the older you are, the later you think midlife begins and ends. Yet midlife isn’t only about the number of candles on your birthday cake.

Regardless of the exact ages you believe middle age begins and ends, we believe that midlife is the hinge point between the first and second halves of our lives. Who we were before and who we want to become after middle age presses in on us from both sides. And the opportunity to positively impact others is one of the most pivotal aspects of midlife.

Midlife is a time when you likely hold more roles and responsibilities than at other times. There can be an intense feeling that everyone is counting on you for so much. It’s caring for your kids while also helping your aging parents. It’s advising junior and senior colleagues at work. You’re literally in the middle, pulled in many directions. That’s the essence of midlife. It’s less about your chronological age and more about how you feel in your unique and often challenging position between generations at home, at work, and elsewhere.

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2. There are many facets of age.

Knowing someone’s chronological age doesn’t tell you much except how long they have lived. Although born in the same year, people of the same age will vary in their life circumstances, and these differences become more pronounced over time. There are more meaningful ways to think about age that can provide useful information about someone’s quality of life and health span. One is subjective age, or how old you feel. In MIDUS and other studies, we find that most healthy adults feel significantly younger than their birth certificate says they are. People aged 40 and above who are healthy typically say they feel about 20 percent younger than their age. So, if you are 40 and in good health, you are likely to feel like you are in your early 30s, and if you are 50, you may feel like you are still 40.

Biological age captures physical health across many dimensions, such as hand-grip strength, lung function, walking speed, blood pressure, and telomere length (DNA at the tips of a chromosome), and compares your results to those of people who are younger or older. If you are 55, your biological age might be younger than your chronological age if your test results resemble those of the average 45-year-old. Formulas are also used to predict your pace of aging, showing that some people age faster than others at the cellular level. We can also measure your brain age using brain scans to calculate brain volume and cortical thickness relative to your chronological age. A younger brain age is associated with fewer signs of cognitive impairment or dementia.

As biomarkers of age continue to become more reliable, there is a growing market for longevity clinics, which offer extensive workups and diagnostics with the aim of providing information to help slow or even reverse the aging process. Although the quality of these assessments varies, they can provide useful information that can lead to adaptive lifestyle changes and personalized interventions. And who wouldn’t feel great if their results show their biological age is younger than their actual age? These other indicators of age can tell us more about what’s in store for our health than chronological age alone because your subjective age, biological age, and brain age reflect your functional capacity, your wear and tear. If you can do the things you want to do, then you feel young. If not, you feel old. Your birth certificate is an official record, but what matters is whether you’re living the healthy life you want.

3. Social relationships are good for health.

In midlife, we have many responsibilities for others in the family, at work, and in the community. It can be overwhelming and exhausting. Yet, caring and concern for others is a midlife specialty. The famous psychoanalyst Erik Erikson identified generativity as the central task of midlife. It’s this deep concern for the next generation—not just your own kids, but younger colleagues, students, and people in your community.

Mentoring is a classic example. You’ve accumulated all this knowledge and experience, and there’s this powerful drive to pass it on. It’s how we transcend our own mortality and create a legacy. Our impact continues through the people we’ve invested in.

It’s not just the recipients of support who benefit. Providing support to others can bring satisfaction, a sense of purpose, and health benefits to the giver. One word of caution, though: It is easy to get caught up in supporting others, but you also need support. A balance between giving and receiving support is important for health and well-being.

According to the Pew Research Center, about a quarter of adults are providing care for a child under 18 and a parent over age 65, a group often called the sandwich generation. This can be stressful as it pulls people in so many directions and leaves little time for leisure or alone time. Keep in mind that it’s also important to accept help from others, whether it is tangible support or emotional support.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

4. Focus more on the gains than on the losses.

In their 40s, many notice early signs of aging tied to physical changes, such as thinning or graying hair, the need for reading glasses, slower reaction times, and aches and pains that take longer to heal. Our culture values looking young, which fuels the multi-billion-dollar anti-aging industry, including Botox, plastic surgery, hair dye, hair transplants, anti-wrinkle skin products, and longevity supplements. People typically focus on the physical and cognitive changes that come with age and think it’s all downhill after 40. Such negative aging stereotypes aren’t just annoying; they’re dangerous. Research shows they can literally affect lifespan.

In midlife and beyond, there are tremendous gains still happening in many areas such as self-confidence, emotion regulation, knowledge, and problem-solving. For people in midlife now, focusing on maintaining or improving health and well-being for oneself and one’s loved ones is so important given how “out of control” the outside world can feel. The good news is that you can choose how you process and respond to the challenges of aging. A psychosocial prescription for healthy aging includes positive attitudes such as a sense of control, purpose in life, and optimism, which are important as they can reduce stress and motivate and sustain health-promoting behaviors that contribute to better physical and cognitive health in later life.

What we make of midlife is largely up to us. Making the most of it can bend the curve toward healthy, productive aging. The key is what you do with what you’ve got. “Use it or lose it” isn’t just a catchy phrase; it’s a physical reality. Your brain, your muscles, and your social connections all respond to investment. Being gain-framed means asking, “What can I improve?” instead of “What am I losing?”

Midlife is an opportunity. It’s a golden chance we should seize. It is a time to make sense of the past and sow the seeds for the future. If you view midlife through the lens of opportunity, everything changes for the better.

5. Investments in midlife health pay big dividends.

What happens in midlife doesn’t stay in midlife. There is growing evidence that midlife health indicators may be more important for later-life health and longevity than the same indicators at older ages. Blood pressure, lung function, glucose levels, cholesterol, sleep, physical fitness, and weight in midlife are strong predictors of health and cognition in later life.

Health in midlife provides a window on later life and can inform preventative interventions to optimize functioning and health span. There is a great deal of interest in identifying modifiable beliefs and lifestyle factors that can promote healthy aging. Results from many studies provide convincing evidence that addressing risk factors in midlife and adopting adaptive behaviors, such as engaging in physical and cognitive activity, can yield long-term benefits for health outcomes and longevity.

Middle age is an ideal time to make lifestyle changes to increase health span. If you want to make one lifestyle change with widespread benefits, physical activity is a panacea. You would have to be hibernating or living in a bubble not to know that physical exercise is important for your health. Yet only about a quarter of adults in midlife engage in the recommended amount of exercise: at least 150 minutes a week of moderate-intensity activity, such as brisk walking, and at least two days a week of muscle-strengthening activities.

Exercise has remarkable benefits for physical, cognitive, and psychological health. Those who engage in regular exercise have a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, frailty, dementia, and depression, and they live longer. There are many types of exercise that are beneficial. It doesn’t have to involve expensive equipment or joining a gym. The earlier you start, the better, although it’s never too late to begin.

The Big Idea: Fatherhood isn’t a state men arrive at. It’s something their brains and bodies are actively building, one diaper change and bedtime story at a time.

Why It Matters: Decades of parenting research has centered mothers. Fathers have been treated as static — present or absent, helpful or not — but rarely as people undergoing their own profound biological transformation. Recent research shows that involved fathers experience measurable brain changes, testosterone shifts, and even a “cost of caregiving” that mirrors what new mothers face. Fatherhood, it turns out, is a public health issue, and an understudied one.

These ideas come from Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives by . Darby is an award-winning clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where she has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles. Read on for 5 of her big ideas.

1. Great fathers are made, not born.

We might think that parents are pre-wired to provide sensitive care, but the evidence so far tells us the opposite: our brains and biology change as we gain experience with parenting. Parenting comes online with practice. This is especially true for fathers, because they are so variable, and they don’t get the benefit of pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding to kickstart their hormones. Time and repetition shape the fathering brain and body. If fathers are nervous that they won’t have the knack of parenting their kids, the best thing they can do is to dive in and learn their children’s unique wants and needs. Every child is different, so every parent can become the world’s premier expert on their own kid.

We can think of fatherhood is a useful adaptation that gives humans (and other biparental organisms) special advantages. Children can survive without fathers, but they usually benefit when dads are in the picture. Another way to say this is that fatherhood is facultative, not obligatory. The involvement of fathers, along with other alloparents, helps make humanity flexible and resilient and may be one of the secrets to our success as a species.

Fatherhood is both innate and learned. Men are wired to care. We know that nature intended males to participate in childcare because men have brains and bodies that respond to babies and children in ways that prime nurturing and sensitive caretaking behaviors. We also know that many of these brain and biological adaptations come online when fathers invest time and practice into parenthood. The more dads invest in parenting, the more their brains and bodies change, and the more skills they develop.

We’re all born with the ability to learn French. We have brains that can hear patterns in sounds, comprehend grammatical structures, and use context clues to parse out sentences. But whether we take the opportunity to learn the language depends on our interests, choices, and culture—especially the time we spend with French-speaking people in French-speaking places. Parenting is a little like this. We are born primed to become great parents, but experience and exposure make it possible.

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2. Fathering and mothering are different, but more overlapping than distinct.

Moms and dads differ in both biology and behavior. For one thing, in fatherhood, we tend to see changes primarily in the parts of the brain that engage in higher-order thinking rather than in the emotion and reward centers, which appear more dynamic in mothers. We also know that testosterone reflects men’s reproductive priorities and changes in ways that seem to help men get ready for fatherhood.

There’s evidence that fathers parent in specific ways, such as more active, risk-taking play, greater emphasis on sports and adventure, and an affinity for parenting older kids. However, as with most of the science on gender differences, the differences within mothers or fathers are generally larger than the differences between mothers and fathers.

There are plenty of mothers who are more physically playful than fathers, and plenty of fathers who are more nurturing and patient than moms. It is very likely that when we get larger, better neurobiology studies, we’ll see that brain and hormone changes diverge widely across individuals as well. Biological sex gives us a template and tells us something about average trends, but it’s not a prescription for any one individual parent. Sex and gender probably don’t matter as much as we think when predicting how different parents operate.

Fathers vary, and they vary depending on what’s at stake in a society. Some fathers are primary caregivers, others are absent from their children’s lives, and there are many gradations in between, from dads who see their role mostly as providers to dads who plunge right into day-to-day hands-on care. This level of involvement can be shaped by how societies make their living and whether they are more cooperative or more competitive. It can also be shaped by culture, religion, politics, gender dynamics, family expectations, and lots of other stuff. It’s definitely not shaped by biology alone.

3. Biology aside, the journey into fatherhood is still transformative.

Biological mothers change in shape and size during pregnancy, making their transformation incredibly obvious. It’s easier to overlook what’s happening to fathers. But men can have an emotional reaction to their partner’s pregnancy and birth, and they undergo an identity, lifestyle, and perspective shift that parallels women’s.

We accept as a truism that motherhood changes our bodies, our health, and our priorities, but fathers are too often seen as static. If we recognize that fatherhood can change men inside and out, we can do more to support them through these transformations.

Introducing the First Look Club — our early-reviewer program for the most curious readers. Members get free advance copies of standout new books before they hit shelves, read them first, and help decide which ones we champion next. There’s no cost and no catch. Sign up and we’ll email you the moment new books open up.

4. Paternal transformation brings both vulnerability and opportunity.

My research has found that the very same brain changes that track with fathers’ time with their kids, motivation to parent, and involvement in parenting are also linked with their depression, anxiety, and sleep problems.

We also found that the same testosterone changes that link up with a better coparenting relationship and more engagement in parenting are linked with dads’ depression. There may be a “cost of caregiving” that is reflected in our neurobiology. When dads devote themselves to hands-on childcare, we see benefits for partners and kids (and even for dads themselves in the long run). But we also see a mental health cost and a hit to dads’ sleep. The answer isn’t for dads not to invest in parenting, but for us to work harder as a society to support caregivers, both new moms and new dads.

Fatherhood has many chapters. Whether you have kids at 21 or 51, fatherhood is lifelong. Fatherhood starts before a baby is born, and it doesn’t end when a child is out of diapers.

Boys can (and should) gain early caregiving experiences that help prepare them to be parents. In late life, fatherhood appears to be neuroprotective, linked to younger brain age and greater longevity. But fatherhood also looks different throughout your child’s life. Although much of the neurobiological research on parenting focuses on the early years, many dads enjoy parenting more as their kids get older, and teens can derive great benefits from their relationships with their fathers. And many men are embracing the grandfather role.

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5. Fatherhood never happens in isolation.

The transition to fatherhood involves other people: a child, and often a partner, as well as extended family and caregivers. Becoming a dad can connect you more to these people. It also means that the changes you are experiencing will affect the people in your life. Building a bond with a child takes time, practice, and investment, and it’s also shaped by the particular child that you have. The partner relationship may need extra attention to flourish during this time, but it can also be a source of support, both material and emotional. Fatherhood as an interpersonal experience also means that choices that dads make—like how much paternity leave to take, whether to get mental health treatment, or whether to supplement their testosterone—don’t happen in isolation but can affect the other people in their family.

The transition to fatherhood might be an inflection point for many of the health risks we care about in mid- and late life. That includes obesity and heart disease. It also includes mental health, for both moms and dads. Fathers’ involvement in childrearing can also shape children’s welfare—their risk of falling into poverty, their health, their rates of behavioral problems, learning difficulties, and even their future involvement with the criminal justice system. Poor health and crime are both costly to society. And the falling global birth rate threatens our future economic security. Fatherhood isn’t just an individual choice but a public good. We should treat it that way when we think about public policies that might support fathers. What if paternity leave is the secret weapon that can bring down men’s heart disease risk, maternal depression rates, or child poverty? Investing in fathers might be smart public policy.

However, there’s still plenty we don’t know yet about fathers. Fathers have been left out of so much parenting research and programming. There are big gaps in what we know. Fathers are interesting and deserving of study, precisely because they are so variable yet have the potential to make huge contributions to children’s lives.

The world is getting smarter — and so are we. The rise of AI isn't just about our machines; it's about our collective capacity to access one another's intelligence and let the best ideas rise to the surface. This week, authors Robert Wright, Joe Navarro, and Donna Jackson Nakazawa each brought us a piece of that puzzle — ideas to sharpen your mind, deepen your relationships, and make life measurably richer.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Podcast

Are you ready for superintelligence?

Does the logic of human destiny now lead to artificial intelligence? Are we creating a higher form of intelligence in our own image? And, if so, what kind of image is that?

These are the questions celebrated author asks in his new book, The God Test, which was published this week.

Bob argues that we should not be surprised to see signs of deception, power-seeking, flattery, and autonomy in AI systems. These are not alien traits; they are behaviors that show up again and again in intelligent systems — including us. And if there is an evolutionary process at work in AI, then we are not just observers: we are part of the selection pressure. In the end, we may get the AI we deserve.

This was such a wide-ranging conversation that we’ve divided it into two episodes. Check out part one on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Book Bite of the Week

What’s not being said?

Most of us think communication is about words. It isn’t. Every day, people reveal their emotions, needs, intentions, and level of comfort through posture, facial expressions, distance, movement, and countless other nonverbal cues. Learning to notice those signals—and manage our own—can transform our relationships.

These ideas come from Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language by Joe Navarro. Navarro is a 25-year FBI veteran and former counterintelligence agent, now a globally recognized expert on nonverbal communication who consults for major corporations and governments worldwide. Check out his key insights on the Next Big Idea app.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is the nonfiction title debuting at #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list, Courage Can Save US by Rye Barcott, a Marine veteran and CEO and co-founder of With Honor. Written ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, it profiles ten leaders in the public arena — nine veterans and a former FBI agent, five Democrats and five Republicans — who carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into elected office. Barcott explores real courage in its many forms — and how choosing it can strengthen our democracy as well as our own lives. Praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jonathan Haidt, H.R. McMaster, and Jim Fallows.

This Week on the Next Big Idea Daily Podcast

How can I outwit my inner defeatist?

Thought spiraling is a normal but often harmful survival mechanism of the brain, not a personal failing. By understanding what our repetitive thoughts are trying to tell us and learning to observe them rather than get trapped inside them, we can transform mental suffering into self-awareness, healing, and creativity.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is a science journalist who has authored five books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, stress, and emotion, including Girls on the Brink, named one of the best health books of the year by multiple major publications. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today, among other outlets. Her new book is Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist. Pick up a copy 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:

Robert Wright, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love!

Beth Simone Noveck, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy

Tom Mullaney, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information

The Big Idea: Most of us spend our days surrounded by opportunities for connection that we routinely ignore. We stay quiet on the train, avoid chatting with strangers, and hesitate to reach out to friends. The irony? Research shows those interactions are usually far more enjoyable and meaningful than we expect.

Why It Matters: Loneliness isn’t just unpleasant. It’s a serious health risk. Social isolation is associated with poorer physical health, lower happiness, and shorter lifespans. Yet many of us avoid connection because we mistakenly assume it will be awkward, uncomfortable, or unwelcome. We’re wrong more often than we realize.

Try This: Today, make one small social move: text a friend you’ve been meaning to contact, chat with the cashier, or strike up a conversation with someone nearby. When in doubt, reach out.

These ideas come from A Little More Social: How Small Choices Create Unexpected Happiness, Health, and Connection by Nicholas Epley. Nicholas is a professor of behavioral science and faculty director of the Roman Family Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. Social isolation kills.

Centuries ago, Aristotle noted that “man is by nature a social animal.” But I think even Aristotle would be surprised by just how important social connections really are to our happiness and health, and even to how long we live.

Decades and decades of psychological research indicate that being connected to other people is one of the most consistently enjoyable, enlightening, and enriching experiences we have, arguably influencing our happiness more than almost anything else.

Being socially isolated, in contrast, is a social stressor that pumps cortisol into our bloodstream, compromises immune function, and harms cardiovascular function. Being socially isolated turns out to be as big a risk factor for early death as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Being isolated kills our happiness, harms our health, and can shorten our lives.

2. Social connection is a choice.

Social connection isn’t something that just happens to us; it’s also a choice we make: to reach out and connect with another person or hold back and avoid them. It might be the most important choice we routinely make in our lives because how we make this choice determines so much about our happiness, health, and success.

“It might be the most important choice we routinely make in our lives.”

Research over the last 50 years has shown that those of us who reach out to connect with others more routinely are happier and more satisfied in their lives, a finding that holds for both introverts and extroverts. Some of the most surprising research in the field of wellbeing even documents that encouraging people to act more extroverted, whether in a short 30-minute lab session or over the course of several weeks, increases people’s wellbeing. Meanwhile, acting more introverted diminishes well-being, again for both introverts and extroverts alike.

How you might choose to reach out and connect with others will be unique to you. However, choosing to hold back and avoid others can rob us of happiness and well-being we could otherwise have in our lives.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is the nonfiction title debuting at #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list, Courage Can Save US by Rye Barcott, a Marine veteran and CEO and co-founder of With Honor. Written ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, it profiles ten leaders in the public arena — nine veterans and a former FBI agent, five Democrats and five Republicans — who carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into elected office. Barcott explores real courage in its many forms — and how choosing it can strengthen our democracy as well as our own lives. Praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jonathan Haidt, H.R. McMaster, and Jim Fallows.

3. Mistaken pessimism creates mistaken avoidance.

Both my career and my character changed one morning on my commute into my office at the University of Chicago. That morning, I noticed something odd that I had been overlooking for years. There I was, sitting in a train loaded with people, and we were sitting in complete silence, choosing to ignore each other. That morning, I struck up a conversation with the person sitting next to me—a woman wearing a fabulous red hat. That conversation turned out not just to be good, but surprisingly good.

From that moment came an experiment we conducted on the trains going into Chicago. We found that my pessimism wasn’t unique. Commuters thought they would have the happiest commutes if they kept to themselves rather than talk to a stranger, but we found the exact opposite to be true when we had people do each of these things.

People underestimate how positively reaching out to connect with someone will turn out, and as a result, we mistakenly avoid reaching out to connect with other people when it is easy and safe to do so. This misplaced pessimism is now a result we have seen repeatedly, causing us to be overly avoidant across many areas of our lives.

4. Reaching out reaches back.

It’s so easy for us to miss the amount of power we have to create meaningful social connections every single day. Our social lives are governed by the norm of reciprocity: you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. When you smile at someone, what do they tend to back to you? When you say hello, most people tend to say hello back.

“Our social lives are governed by the norm of reciprocity.”

And yet, our research shows that it’s easy to underestimate the power we have when we reach out to connect with someone in a positive way. This misunderstanding is a key reason we underestimate how much we can enrich our lives by reaching out to connect with others a little more often.

5. Recognize easy opportunities routinely.

Being overly pessimistic about how positively others will respond to us if we reach out to connect doesn’t mean we should be reaching out all the time or that it always turns out well. It means we underestimate the likelihood that it will turn out well.

We can all choose to connect a little more wisely if we keep four words in mind: Recognize Easy Opportunities Routinely.

These words are a reminder to notice easy moments to connect with others and then choose those moments routinely so they become habits. This is a key to enriching your social life, which in turn will enrich, enlighten, and increase the enjoyment you have in life overall. To get started, I suggest keeping one final thought in mind: when in doubt, reach out.

The Big Idea: Most of us think communication is about words. It isn’t. Every day, people reveal their emotions, needs, intentions, and level of comfort through posture, facial expressions, distance, movement, and countless other nonverbal cues. Learning to notice those signals—and manage our own—can transform our relationships.

Why It Matters: The strongest predictor of a long, happy life isn’t wealth, status, or achievement. It’s the quality of our relationships. In an age increasingly dominated by screens and AI, the ability to connect face-to-face may be becoming one of our most valuable human skills.

Try This: In your next conversation, spend less time thinking about what you’re going to say next and more time observing. How much space does the other person prefer? Do they lean in or pull back? What emotions are showing up beneath their words?

These ideas come from Mastering Connections: Build Stronger Relationships with the Science of Body Language by Joe Navarro. Navarro is a 25-year FBI veteran and former counterintelligence agent, now a globally recognized expert on nonverbal communication who consults for major corporations and governments worldwide. Read on for 5 of his big ideas.

1. Most people go through life merely looking but not truly seeing.

Many people glance at faces, rooms, gestures, or even events unfolding before them, yet fail to extract meaning from what is plainly there. From childhood, we are taught to read books, solve equations, and memorize facts, but almost never are we taught the disciplined art of observation. And yet observation is one of the most important survival skills, and one which exceptional individuals all share.

Observation is the foundation of situational awareness. It allows us to read the room before a word is spoken, to sense the tension among colleagues already waiting in a room, or to see that someone needs quiet time alone. The skilled observer sees not just what is present, but what is absent, what has changed, what is incongruent, and what demands attention first. Knowing what needs your attention now, in this moment above all, is most important.

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2. How to assess for needs and preferences.

The quicker we can assess needs or preferences, the quicker we become more trustworthy, reliable, and dependable in their eyes. Through observation, we can instinctively adjust our distance, tone, pace, energy, and timing. We can synchronize better with others, and synchrony is harmony. We can deliver on their needs because we can sense them. If they are tired, hungry, thirsty, or lost, we can assist immediately before they have to say a word. That level of attentiveness is endearing.

Some people require more personal space. Others need more time before they trust. Some prefer directness, while others respond better to warmth and gradual engagement. The skilled observer recognizes these preferences early and adapts accordingly. Honoring the personal preferences of others is so important. This makes the person feel understood and safe—and safety is the foundation upon which trust is built. It lets them know that we get it, that it is okay to talk standing further apart, or to whisper in the hallway, or to share a hot drink while discussing business early in the morning.

Behavior is information. Every movement, every hesitation, every shift in posture, every silence tells a story. The body leaks truth continuously. We may carefully edit our words, but our comfort, fears, insecurities, confidence, and intentions reveal themselves nonverbally.

3. Recognizing and diffusing conflict before it escalates.

We’ve all experienced emotional moments when things get out of hand, but most of us aren’t taught how to look for the features that signal things are going to escalate, nor are we taught how to properly de-escalate. You can use your body to de-escalate by using proven methods such as angling slightly, making less eye contact, and using the tone of your voice to calm things down. Even a well-executed exhale at the right moment can make a nervous or tense individual settle down.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is the nonfiction title debuting at #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list, Courage Can Save US by Rye Barcott, a Marine veteran and CEO and co-founder of With Honor. Written ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, it profiles ten leaders in the public arena — nine veterans and a former FBI agent, five Democrats and five Republicans — who carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into elected office. Barcott explores real courage in its many forms — and how choosing it can strengthen our democracy as well as our own lives. Praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jonathan Haidt, H.R. McMaster, and Jim Fallows.

4. How to earn the trust of others.

If you ask most people how to be trustworthy, they might say one or two things: I’ll be at work on time or if I find a cellphone, I’ll return it to the owner. Yes, we expect that from everyone. But establishing trust is so much more than that. Trust is one of those things no one asks for directly, but they look for in our behavior. Trust is performative.

How we perform every day creates and increases our trustworthiness. Our attitude, our attention to detail, the timeliness of our actions, the performance of our duties, the speed at which we react or act, and our ability to deliver on time all speak to our trustworthiness. Trust is our responsibility to display at all times.

The trustworthy observer notices what others overlook: who feels excluded, who is overwhelmed, who is frightened, who is masking distress behind a smile or forced confidence, and who quietly needs support. Most people never verbalize their struggles directly; they reveal them through behavior, posture, silence, distance, and subtle changes in demeanor. To recognize these signals and respond with understanding rather than indifference. Those abilities are what garner trust.

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. Making immediate positive and lasting first impressions.

According to Dr. Nalini Ambady at Harvard University and her colleagues, we make judgments in as little as 30 milliseconds. That’s faster than you can blink. That means we have to get how we are perceived right from the very beginning.

Our energy, our eagerness, our enthusiasm, even our manners are nonverbals that get noticed and either have a positive effect on others or don’t. Did you know that the worst thing you can do on a virtual call is to hold still? You are perceived as less trustworthy.

Something as important as how to increase how long people will engage with us—what I call face time—is important if you want to get a point across. Great storytelling helps, but you can use your own body, even your neck, to get people to stay and talk to you longer in a way that is more powerful than asking. Even your feet can help others stay with you longer.

Men and women differ in how they bond and so much of that is based on nonverbals. Standing side by side while making no eye contact works for some, while others must make frequent eye contact, making connection better if they face each other. Even how we touch things or hold them, and how frequently, matters. Especially when it comes to loved ones.

The findings of the Harvard Grant Study, which has been ongoing since before World War II, are surprising. Success and longevity are not determined by where you come from, how wealthy your family is, or how many push-ups you can do. The greatest predictor of success and longevity is amiability: the ability to get along with others, be well-liked, and have a group of friends you can trust, touch, laugh with, and hold.

In a world where young people report being isolated, sad, and depressed, while having more ways to communicate than at any other time in human history, it is because they are not connecting as we evolved to connect. It is due, in part, to how they communicate. There is less face-to-face interpersonal contact—it is less tactile. There is less hugging and less hand-holding. There is less of what the great Desmond Morris called disguised intimacy. It is that healthy intimacy that is so often missing with young people and with the elderly who, for a variety of reasons, are more isolated than ever at increasing rates.

We are a species that communicates principally nonverbally. How well we do that shapes how we are perceived, how others associate with us, but most importantly how long we will live and how happy we will be. Sobering thoughts in the time of AI. This book is the antidote.

The Big Idea: The endless replaying of conversations, mistakes, worries, and what-ifs isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival mechanism, but one that can become a trap.

Why It Matters: Many of us spend hours each week trapped in mental reruns, replaying old conversations, imagining future disasters, or searching for answers that never arrive. Research suggests that rumination is one of the strongest predictors of both mental and physical health. Learning to spot these thought spirals may be one of the most important emotional skills we can develop.

Try This: The next time you catch yourself replaying the same thought for the third or fourth time, pause and ask: What story is my brain trying to tell me right now? Naming the story often loosens its grip.

These ideas come from the new book Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist by . Donna is a science journalist who has authored five books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, stress, and emotion, including Girls on the Brink, named one of the best health books of the year by multiple major publications. Her work has appeared in Wired, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and Psychology Today, among other outlets. Read on for five of her big ideas.

1. Being caught up in our mind drama is part of the nuts and bolts of being alive.

In researching the science of rumination—those sticky thought spirals we can’t escape—I discovered that most of us get lost in our mind drama far more often than we want to be, and more than is good for us. And according to recent indicators, most of us are ruminating more than we ever have before.

We often refer to ruminating as “thought spiraling” in our common vernacular—getting locked in a loop of negative, repetitive thinking you can’t turn off. Something happens, like a difficult conversation with a friend, a conversation with our partner that went sideways, or wondering why our co-worker made that snarky comment, and our mind goes off the deep end.

We replay past interactions or conversations, wishing we’d said or done something differently, or future-cast about what might happen next. We get lost in thoughts in which we judge ourselves and others harshly.

The world we’re living in doesn’t help! We’re living inside a perfect storm for thought spiraling: political chaos, a pandemic that’s barely in the rearview mirror, a loneliness epidemic, social media delivering an unending fire hose of fear and outrage. Our nervous systems are running hot all the time. Is it any wonder we can’t turn our brains off, or lower the volume?

Yet, a third of adults aren’t familiar with the word “rumination” or what it means. It’s very hard to solve a problem you’ve never named.

2. Thought spiraling is not a character flaw. It’s a survival response gone rogue.

Our very human tendency to get caught up in mind drama is our brain’s misguided effort to protect us. It just doesn’t know when or how to stop. We fall into the trap of overthinking and thought spiraling because our brains dangle before us a false promise: if you keep thinking about this, you’ll find the perfect answer. But the relief never comes, only more story spinning—and it feels dreadful.

You’re making dinner, or driving, and you get so lost in your mind drama—replaying that snarky thing your neighbor said, or the thing your sister did that was so upsetting—and suddenly you’ve lost whole swaths of time. When you’re caught up in ruminating, your brain’s story-spinning center goes on lockdown. It’s firing at full speed, but it’s cut off from the other brain areas that give perspective, creativity, and insight. Instead of solving the problem, you feel more tense, lonely, fearful, angry, and anxious.

“When you’re caught up in ruminating, your brain’s story-spinning center goes on lockdown.”

Getting swept up in rumination isn’t good for our mental health: your brain can’t tell the difference between something terrible happening right now in real life and you simply replaying it over and over in your head. Both have the same impact on your body and brain. You get caught up in a heightened stress response that ramps up inflammatory chemicals and hormones, which can be harmful to your health over time. This is why so many studies suggest that the degree to which we ruminate, more than any other mental act, determines our mental and physical health.

This week’s Book of the Day sponsor is the nonfiction title debuting at #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list, Courage Can Save US by Rye Barcott, a Marine veteran and CEO and co-founder of With Honor. Written ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, it profiles ten leaders in the public arena — nine veterans and a former FBI agent, five Democrats and five Republicans — who carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into elected office. Barcott explores real courage in its many forms — and how choosing it can strengthen our democracy as well as our own lives. Praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jonathan Haidt, H.R. McMaster, and Jim Fallows.

3. We all ruminate about the same thing.

Whether it’s replaying that sarcastic remark your partner made, thinking about that critique from your boss, or looking at your phone 20 times to see if someone texted you back, rumination is always about our fear of not belonging and not mattering. This is why your mind loads up the same reels time and again, and why it can be so hard to get them to stop.

Your habitual patterns of rumination deserve gentle introspection and understanding rather than self-criticism or shame. That’s the tender thing underneath all the mental noise. When properly heard, our patterns of rumination are often a signal fire from the past, an invitation to tend to the unheard parts of ourselves: fear, anxiety, exile, grief, anger, hurt.

By listening to what our ruminations are trying to tell us, we can gain profound insights about ourselves that not only help us exit our thought spirals but also turn those insights into opportunities for growth. Yet most of us have never been taught a single strategy for getting out of it.

4. Scientists know exactly which part of the brain drives thought spiraling.

The most effective tool for exiting rumination is what I call the MIST Framework: It’s a tool I developed (based on the latest neuroscience) to help us quickly exit our thought spiraling by naming the experiences this specific area of the brain generates.

When we’re caught in our mind drama, we’re lost in a mental fog and can’t see clearly. MIST is an acronym to help us identify our recurring thought patterns with real specificity so we can see them and move past them:

• M: Name the Mental Movies we keep replaying when we’re ruminating and the story that they tell us about ourselves. That might be something like, “Here is my old story of how people always dismiss me,” or “Here’s my old story about how I can’t speak up for myself when I need to.”

• I: Identify the Intense Emotions our familiar mental reels trigger. That might be something like, “Here’s my story of how people diminish me, which makes me feel small and afraid.”

• S: Name the Somatic Physical Sensations that accompany our mental movies and intense emotions, and also where we feel that tension in our body.

• T: Tie It All Together. That might be something like, “Here’s my old story of how people dismiss me, which makes me feel small and afraid and my heart pound.”

When we use the MIST Framework, we see our familiar thought patterns spiral into new clarity. This is the first step toward emotional freedom. Suddenly, it’s not so painful. It’s as if our brain says: “Oh, you caught me!” This isn’t just positive thinking. It’s neuroscience. fMRI studies prove that naming your emotions precisely physically shifts brain activity.

5. “Rumination” has two sides.

Rumination can refer to our dark, brooding mental energy, but it can also mean “to muse” and to imagine and create. The goal is to exit the dark side of rumination and enter the upsides of rumination: creativity, insight, ideation, imagination, musing, and problem-solving.

The goal is to recognize that our thought spiraling is a signal fire from the past and to tend to those unseen parts of ourselves so we can see that hurt and pain—that old story—and emotionally process it at last. The goal isn’t to silence your mind. It’s to transform what you do with that energy so you can devote your precious mental energy to everything you love to think about and do.

Rumination isn’t your enemy. The things you ruminate on are messages. Learn to read them and you’ll find the path out.

The Big Idea: Most organizations treat team performance as a talent problem: hire better people, get better results. But according to psychologist Ron Friedman, the biggest difference between average teams and exceptional ones is something else entirely: how they’re designed. The best teams protect focus, reduce friction, encourage experimentation, and create cultures where teammates elevate one another.

Why It Matters: Burnout, endless meetings, and risk-averse cultures aren’t inevitable. They’re symptoms of systems that were poorly designed. As AI automates more individual work, an organization’s competitive advantage may increasingly come down to one thing: its ability to build teams that can learn, adapt, and perform together.

Try This: Audit your next five meetings. For each one, ask: What decision is being made? If there’s no clear answer, cancel it or turn it into an email.

These ideas come from the new book Superteams: The Science and Secrets of High-Performing Teams, by Ron Friedman. Trained as a psychologist, Ron began his career studying human motivation in the lab and teaching at colleges and universities. He later brought those insights into the corporate world, helping organizations understand public opinion and craft more persuasive messages grounded in behavioral science. Read on for five of his big ideas.

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1. Average teams make burnout inevitable.

Let me give you a snapshot of how the average team operates. The average worker spends 18 hours a week in meetings and 11 hours digging through messages. That’s three-quarters of their week—gone. What’s left for real work? A little over a day.

How do you cram a week’s work into a single day? You come in early, you stay late, or you work on weekends. That can serve you in the short term, but work like that for months or years and, invariably, you’re going to burn out.

Superteams are much more intentional with their time. Meetings are a last resort, not a default. They’re 50 percent better at avoiding unnecessary meetings. And they’re 54 percent less likely to schedule recurring meetings.

Superteams also schedule dedicated focus time. Things like meeting-free days, when people can do deep work without being expected to respond to messages during the day. Except they don’t call them meeting-free days—they call them “get things done days” because they want to reinforce the purpose of the initiative.

In Superteams, I take you through the exact strategies the best teams use to replace the barrage of meetings and messages with opportunities for focused work. But for now, if I had to boil down how Superteams get more done into a simple formula, it would be this: Minimize distractions and maximize focus.

2. You can’t be a Superteam if you lose half your week to meetings.

If you’re like most people, you lose close to half your week to meetings. And for leaders, it’s even worse because the higher you rise, the more meetings you’re expected to attend. Most people recognize that bad meetings waste their time. What they don’t realize is that even good meetings come with a cost.

The first cost happens before the meeting even starts. Simply knowing that you have a meeting coming up makes it harder to focus. It’s called predistraction and it happens for two reasons:

· Your attention splits. Part of you is focused on what you need to prepare or say, which makes it harder to think.

· You’re less willing to start a difficult task because you know it will be interrupted. So, you end up procrastinating on your most important work.

Then there’s what happens after the meeting ends. Your brain doesn’t reset right away. Part of your attention is stuck replaying what you just discussed. That leaves you with less mental firepower for your next task. Psychologists call this attention residue. The more meetings you attend, the more scattered your focus.

How do the best teams fend off unnecessary meetings? The simple fix is meeting guidelines. At most organizations, just about anyone can call a meeting for any reason. There’s no guidance on when a meeting is warranted. The unfortunate truth is that a lot of people use meetings as a crutch. It feels productive to call a meeting, and it allows you to procrastinate until the meeting happens. The best teams clarify when meetings are truly necessary and work together to get clear on what deserves a meeting and what doesn’t.

Within my team, we have one blanket guideline: No decision, no meeting. If you have an update, that’s an email or a Loom. If you have a question, that’s a call or an email. Or, a meeting guideline from the content marketing company Percolate: No spectators. If you’re not participating, you don’t need to be there. That’s not a criticism—it’s respect for your time.

Another way of protecting people’s time is to limit meetings to 15 minutes. It’s a practice taken from the Obama White House. Need longer? No problem. All you need to do is get clearance from the team’s leader.

These practices free up people’s time so they can focus on work that moves the ball forward.

This week's Book of the Day sponsor is the nonfiction title debuting at #5 on the New York Times bestsellers list, Courage Can Save US by Rye Barcott, a Marine veteran and CEO and co-founder of With Honor. Written ahead of America's 250th anniversary, it profiles ten leaders in the public arena — nine veterans and a former FBI agent, five Democrats and five Republicans — who carried the ethic of service from the battlefield into elected office. Barcott explores real courage in its many forms — and how choosing it can strengthen our democracy as well as our own lives. Praised by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jonathan Haidt, H.R. McMaster, and Jim Fallows.

3. On the best teams, teammates are more motivating than the boss.

Superteams don’t just collaborate well; they make each other better. And that word, better, can take on many forms.

The first way teammates on Superteams make each other better is by making excellence the norm. When you’re surrounded by people who do good work, there’s a natural urge to reciprocate and do your part. And we see that in the data. In Superteams, 94 percent agree that their teammates motivate them to do their “best work.”

But they don’t just inspire more effort; they also foster more accountability. We asked workers who they worry more about disappointing when things go wrong, their manager or their team? In Superteams, 82 percent were more concerned with letting down their teammates. On average teams, it was a 50/50 split. We work harder when we know our teammates are counting on us.

Another way Superteams elevate those around them is by raising confidence. Knowing your team has your back gives you the courage to take on bigger challenges and take more intelligent risks. And those risks are often the difference between stagnation and progress. In Superteams, it’s not just about getting work done; it’s about bringing out the best in each other.

4. Superteams keep reinventing themselves.

One of the key strengths of Superteams is that they’re constantly improving, and we’ve found three reasons why:

· They’ve built a strong feedback culture. Their leaders excel at delivering feedback. But the feedback doesn’t just flow top-down—it’s peer-to-peer. Superteams also seek out feedback from peers, which leads to continuous learning and improvement.

· They run more experiments: 50 percent more, in fact. They can be as small as testing a landing page or as big as launching a new product line. The key is to always be working on something that yields new learnings and growth.

· They reward innovation. One example I love comes from 3M, the company that’s best known for Scotch Tape and Post-it Notes. They’ve been around for over 120 years, and a big part of their success comes from a practice they call the Thirty Percent Rule. To qualify for a bonus, a division has to generate 30 percent of its revenue from products launched in the last four years. It’s a great way of ensuring that your team isn’t coasting on with what’s working now—they’re equally focused on what’s next.

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. The best leaders want you to fail.

One reason Superteams keep getting better over time is that they’re willing to experiment. But experimentation only works when people feel safe enough to take intelligent risks. At most companies, getting better is surprisingly difficult because improvement requires risk-taking and failure. Trying something new often involves making mistakes. And unless a team feels comfortable making those mistakes, learning becomes impossible.

In our research, we found that the best leaders make risk-taking and learning feel safe by doing three things:

· They open up about mistakes they’ve made in their career. That teaches people that mistakes aren’t something to hide. They’re something to learn from.

· When they don’t know something, they admit it. That gives everyone permission to be honest. And it makes it clear no one is expected to have all the answers.

· They make it clear that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning.

Back when he was at LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman used to tell his team that he didn’t want perfection. In fact, he wanted them to fail about 15 percent of the time. His view was that avoiding mistakes doesn’t mean you’re doing everything right. It means you’re not moving fast enough.

Reed Hastings had a similar mindset at Netflix. When too many of Netflix’s shows were hits, he would get concerned because it meant the team wasn’t taking enough risks. What both of these examples illustrate is that on high-performing teams, perfection isn’t the goal. Progress is the goal. But getting there requires freedom to make mistakes.

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.

Need a last-minute gift for dad? How about a membership in the Next Big Idea Club?

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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…

Read more

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.

See book-bundle options

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.

See book-bundle options

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.

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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?