La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red soc...
In the long run, the map was a triumph of marketing as much as empirical science. It helped a good idea find a wide audience.
His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion, published in a seminal paper in 1975: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
DR. JOHN SNOW—This well-known physician died at noon on the 16th instant, at his house in Sackville-street, from an attack of apoplexy. His researches on chloroform and other anaesthetics were appreci...
Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animate...
But epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second...
And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from or...
And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it’s often too late—because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of hi...
An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers.
When one looks at innovation in nature and in culture, environments that build walls around good ideas tend to be less innovative in the long run than more open-ended environments.
The hummingbird effect. An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
How do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people whil...
Cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties, she wrote. They get their order from below; they are le...
A walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks;...
Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning disks for the eyes. Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called lenses.
This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the co...
There’s a reason why the world’s wealthiest people—people with near-infinite options vis-à-vis the choice of where to make their home—consistently choose to live in the densest areas on the planet. Ul...
The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science, in particular the fields that descend from the great Darwinian revolution that began only a matter of years...
The FBI’s information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from othe...