Matt Ridley
The longer your past, the longer your future My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is about how the human brain deals with the future. Here it is with added links. I recently came across the phrase “remembering the future.” Rather than some empty poetic paradox, it appeared in an article about […]
Matt Ridley
How to guide children to use the internet in groups to educate themselves My latest Wall Street Journal column is on the work of Sugata Mitra, who is turning education upside down with the help of the internet: His TED talkwas amazing and I have since shared some very enjoyable connversation with him over Chinese […]
Matt Ridley
A debate in the Wall Street Journal Update: here are some readers’ letters about our exchange. I’ve never arm-wrestled Bill Gates, but we have now had a good natured debate in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Here’s his effort, and here’s mine. A quote from his: Although I strongly disagree with what Mr. Ridley […]
On the meaning of the word optimism
Matt Ridley
This is not the best of all possible worlds Here is my latest Wall Street Journal column. It led me into the etymology of the word `optimism’ and the realisation that at first it meant almost the opposite of what we now mean by it, namely that the world was at its `optimum’ and could not […]
Matt Ridley
Here (a bit late) is my latest Wall Street Journal column, on epigenetic inheritance In the debate over whether our fates as individuals are ruled by nature or nurture-that is, by innate qualities or personal experience-one of the most baffling features is the way the nurture advocates manage to cast themselves as the great foes of […]
Matt Ridley
How to regulate the psychology of regulators My latest column in the Wall Street Journal is about the psychology of bureaucracy. just as we need to understand the human proclivities that give rise to booms and busts in markets, so we need to understand the human proclivities that motivate officials. Here are five identified by Slavisa […]
Matt Ridley
My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal On the failed promise of genomics. Is it because common ailments are caused by many different rare genetic variants?
Matt Ridley
Pacific fishing technology and the catallaxy My latest Mind and Matter column from the Wall Street Journal: An odd thing about people, compared with other animals, is that the more of us there are, the more we thrive. World population has doubled in my lifetime, but the world’s income has octupled. The richest places on Earth […]
Peculiar human sex differences
Matt Ridley
I am now writing a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal called Mind and Matter. Here’s the first one. Recently, the psychologist David Buss’s team at the University of Texas at Austin reported that men, when looking for one-night stands, check out women’s bodies. Or as they put it, “men, but not women, have a […]
Matt Ridley
Whenever somebody gets nostalgic about the past, I get suspicious. In the eigth century BC, Hesiod was already moaning about how things aint like they used to be. The Wall Street Journal has a great article about how nostalgic people get for the way air travel used to be in the 1950s — with more leg […]
