Tyler Cowen asks: “Which are the most common everyday phenomena that we don’t properly understand?” From his list: “Lightning (how does it happen?), Sleep; dreams (why do they exist?), Glass (thermodynamics of formation), Turbulence (when does it start?).”
FT: “Sometimes, in a world seemingly obsessed with youth, as well as generally with what is new and cutting edge, we can easily miss the gifts that come from the life experiences and some sustained practices that generations held before ours. We do not always have to search far for wise counsel and guidance. Sometimes trees of wisdom are growing in our midst, if we could only recognise the fruit they offer.”
Bloomberg: “India’s biggest cities as Gen Z and millennials, often with their families in tow, gravitate toward a different kind of nightlife. There’s no alcohol or celebrity DJs. Instead, crowds sing invocations to Hindu deities like Ram and Krishna over bass-heavy beats and amplified drums. Known as bhajan clubbing, the format takes a devotional tradition once rooted in temples and family prayer and repackages it for a younger generation. From small cafes to shopping malls and now stadiums, such gatherings are scaling up.”
Bill Gurley: “While “open source software” is a well-understood concept, a powerful new use of open source has emerged. Over the past fifteen years, a handful of leading business innovators have used open source concepts in an ultra-sophisticated way to solve critical strategic goals. I call this Open Source Strategy. These efforts are reshaping the power dynamics of entire industries and, once fully understood, are nothing short of sheer genius. If you operate in any industry that involves intellectual property and technology, and you do not fully understand this new landscape, you are exposed…Open source is no longer just how good software gets built. It is how dominant incumbents get neutralized, how trillion-dollar industries shift their power structure, and how the next generation of strategic moats gets dug — by the companies smart enough to dig them in the open. The world’s most sophisticated technology companies have spent fifteen years quietly mastering this. Most of the world is still treating open source as a development philosophy when it has long since become a corporate weapon. That gap in understanding is itself a form of structural disadvantage.”
Bruce Feiler: “Rituals are the glue that holds society together, the first human algorithm. Paleoanthropologists have identified what could be ritual gathering places from 300,000 years ago where our earliest ancestors honored their dead. In pretty much every culture ever studied, humans marked moments of uncertainty and joy with collective, ceremonial life celebrations. Rituals calm us when we’re stressed, synchronize our heartbeats when we’re scared and align us to others when we celebrate or mourn together. They strengthen families, neighborhoods and groups of all kinds.”
