Insights

After describing the potential mechanisms underlying its beneficial effects—metabolic switching and stress resistance chiefly among them—the authors go on to describe the reported effects of so-called intermittent fasting (IF) on health and disease, and finish with recommendations for how health care providers can help their patients implement this eating pattern to treat or prevent a…
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By tapping into life’s algorithms, scientists are finding elegant solutions to some of the hardest problems in computer science. Let’s say you’re at a big office party full of people, both coworkers and strangers, when someone walks up to you. You have a split second to determine if you know this person or not; you…
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There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder.  But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a particularly hard time to invest in startups—it’s easier right now to be a capital-taker than a…
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We all get it: yes, the news is overly negative, and yes, it often gets some things wrong. But in the end, we’re better off for it. That’s how the argument usually goes. Some even say we need the news, that democracy is impossible without it. In this article, I’m going to challenge that idea. In fact,…
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Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth of $74 billion, according to Forbes. The Facebook CEO and his wife, Priscilla Chan, could buy their two daughters almost anything. But they don’t. Zuckerberg told CBS’ Gayle King how he and Chan raise their kids to be grounded despite the family wealth. “First of all, we don’t give them everything,”…
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What Kind of Capitalism Do We Want? Though the concept of “stakeholder capitalism” has been around for a half-century, it has only recently begun to gain traction against the prevailing shareholder-primacy model of profit maximization. Now, advocates of a more socially conscious economic system must take steps to ensure that their vision takes hold for…
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So, why make predictions? Eisenhower said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.” The same is true for predictions — they matter for the strategy and data behind them. Predictions are useless, but scenario planning is invaluable.  I’ve been told by CEOs and elected officials that our predictions made them contemplate actions they hadn’t previously…
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The big-risk-big-reward ethos of startups is fuelled by venture capitalists who know that they won’t be the ones to go broke. For a certain sort of nineteenth-century person—the sort with high risk tolerance and little revulsion to brutality—a natural career lay in whaling. The odds of success here were, by almost every measure, poor. An…
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The Inner Game — The standard way of learning is far from being the fastest or most enjoyable. It’s slow, makes us second guess ourselves, and interferes with our natural learning process. Here we explore a better way to learn and enjoy the process. Clearly, almost every human activity involves both the outer and inner…
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The ability to stay the course can make or break a business — and that’s something that self-made billionaire Jack Ma knows well. The iconic entrepreneur has led Alibaba since its inception in 1999. Under his watch, the company grew into a major tech juggernaut to make Ma one of the richest men in China. Ma’s track record comes at…
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