Shorts

Six lessons on how groups and individuals assign blame, stay silent, obey authority and excuse harm without seeing themselves as wrong.

Two short lessons on why people stay in things that no longer serve them, and how to bind your future self instead of relying on willpower.

Two short lessons on the four stress responses of the nervous system, how each shows up in everyday habits and one small tool for each.

Six short lessons on the Fermi paradox, the Great Filter, the dark forest, the doomsday argument and the question of where humanity stands.

Three short lessons on workplace mobbing, a Spanish word English lacks and a set of rules for arguing fairly.

Four short lessons on why memory is a rebuilding process rather than a recording, covering Bartlett's folktale study, reconsolidation, the language you use and the music passed between generations.

Seven shorts on consciousness, from the brain as a receiver to synchronicity archetypes, memory in nature and remote viewing, with clear limits on what is established.

Six short lessons on linguistic relativity, from compass directions and the direction of time to colour words, evidentiality and blame.

Five short lessons on DARVO, double binds, attachment styles, contact comfort and the loss of third places.

Three shorts on how desire and product life can be engineered, from Edward Bernays and the light bulb cartel to scanned books and vanishing originals.

Short lessons on Newspeak, framing, everyday metaphors, algorithm-driven euphemisms, implicature and interpretation.

Four short lessons on terminal lucidity, clinical death studies, near-death experiences and the sense of presence after bereavement.

Two short lessons that use physics and fiction to question how we observe reality and whether time really flows.

Four shorts compare Orwell's fear of control through pain with Huxley's fear of control through pleasure and distraction.

Five short lessons on the Monty Hall problem, Newcomb's paradox, Catch-22 black swan events and Benford's law.

Six short lessons on what the brain filters out, what it still monitors, and how expectation, dreams, distance and being watched change what we perceive and do.

Three shorts on an unreadable manuscript, an ancient Greek device and the Japanese art of kintsugi, about what is lost, kept and made valuable.

Five short lessons on how rewards, metrics, effort and favors shape what we value and why we keep doing things.

Four short lessons on simulated worlds, Plato's cave, Philip K. Dick's 1974 experience and the strange fact that anything exists at all.

Three short lessons on front stage and backstage selves, mimetic desire, and the claim that hierarchy follows possessions.