fetchthe distance wind travels over open water before it becomes a wave

The archive

17 episodes. One question each.

Every claim checked against the source. Where the study doesn't support the headline, the episode says so.

01714:57Will you change more than you think?You'll change more over the next ten years than you expect. Not into a stranger — your place among other people mostly holds. What moves most is what you want.24 October 202601616:01Should you stop being the main character?Stepping back from yourself helps with hard feelings. "Don't be so sensitive" doesn't. The trouble isn't being the main character. It's being your own audience.23 October 202601516:35Does AI actually give you time back?On a single task, often yes. Across a working week, a few percent — and fewer than one in ten people took the saved time as time off. The real question is who gets the hour.22 October 202601415:40How often does meditation go wrong?Under 1% or two in three, depending on whether anyone asks. The honest figure is about the same as talking therapy. What's missing is the person whose job is to ask.16 October 202601316:15Do you need to know what you want before you act?A popular article on 'high agency' tells you to get clear first and to act in spite of doubt. A coin-toss study, a shareholder letter and a fig tree suggest how the two fit together.11 October 202601217:42What Should Your Kid Study in the Age of AI?Job-ready degrees pay more at the start and keep a smaller lead later. Now AI is taking the entry jobs built on book knowledge, the safe technical ones included. So is the major even the right question?6 October 202601119:19Does Blocking the Internet on Your Phone Actually Help?In a well-built trial, two weeks without phone internet improved mood and focus. Only a quarter of volunteers kept the block on, and the ones who didn't got better too. So is the lesson that less is enough, or that some of it was expectation?7 October 202601017:08Do Late-Born Kids Go Further in Sport?Youth football squads are packed with kids born early in the year. Yet the few late-born players who get picked are more likely to reach the senior team. Is it the struggle that makes them, or a filter that only lets the best through?4 October 202600917:15What's the Difference Between a Job and a Calling?Tell people an artist loves her work, and they decide unpaid weekends are more acceptable for her. Yet in one of the founding studies on callings, the people who had one were better paid. Anyone can have a calling. Not everyone can afford to follow one.3 October 202600815:38Do Ice Baths Actually Help Recovery?Researchers poured skin cleanser into a lukewarm bath, called it a recovery oil, and it worked about as well as an ice bath. Cold water helps — but after lifting it probably costs you muscle. The real question is which week you're in.23 September 202600714:14Why Handmade Stopped Being a GuaranteeA Dior handbag left a Milan workshop for as little as €53 and reached a shop floor at €2,600 — sold not on its leather, but on the hand that made it. Craft has won the argument in design, and the word it won with guarantees nothing.22 September 202600615:18Who Actually Found the Challenger O-Ring ProblemFeynman's glass of ice water is the most famous act of individual scientific insight of the last fifty years. It was handed to him, by a general, who got it from an astronaut who couldn't say it herself.21 September 202600519:19How Many Things at OnceSwitching between tasks costs you, and the scientists who lasted longest switched the most. Both are true — they are measured on two different clocks, and half of one rests on six people.15 September 202600418:13Don't Change DirectionEvery hour anyone has put into getting good at something explains about twelve percent of how good they end up. The show's own name gets one thing right about that and two things badly wrong.8 September 202600317:54Where the Decade WentEveryone thinks time speeds up because you stop making memories. A study of 120 people aged 20 to 91 found the opposite — and then a caveat that undoes half of it.29 August 202600216:51You Can't Aim at the Sweet SpotTwenty-five years of research on the mental game of tennis, one model with a pun in it, and two interventions — one of which takes ten minutes and a pen.28 August 202600113:55Start Early, Stay WideWhat the research on junior tennis actually says — and why "but Federer started at three" is an argument against early specialisation, not for it.27 August 2026

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