Ajay Zaveri

The Odyssey. Emma. Hamlet. The Wealth of Nations. Ulysses. The Iliad. This isn’t just a list of books I’ve read and love (though I have). They’re on the reading list for Harvard’s Humanities 10. In the @WSJ, Pamela Paul writes about the surge in demand for the class: applications are up 40% this fall, with 180 first-years competing for 90 spots. Students read a book a week, frequently write essays, have their attendance tracked, and put their devices away during class. As classics professor David Elmer says, “I did have the sense that a lot of students feel that the culture at large is not hospitable to deep reading, deep thinking or deep engagement with writing.” I've been writing about the question AI is forcing on universities: is higher education about information or formation? If it’s only the former, universities are competing with the machines. The students lining up for a phone-free room, the great books, and people to argue with seem to be asking for the latter. As one student put it: “A lot of what we get out of this class is the human experience, and you can’t get that out of AI.” So let AI keep intelligence and humans keep wisdom. This class is one way to build it. What should colleges prioritize most in the age of AI ?

Happy Birthday, Carl. You taught millions of us that being small is not the same as being unimportant. You taught us to be citizens of the cosmos, to be curious, to doubt loudly, and to be gentle with each other on this pale blue dot we call home. We are still looking up. We are still asking. And in this cold, indifferent universe, your voice is one of the warmest things we return to, again and again. It reminds us to be kind, to hold on to our humanity, to keep the candle from guttering out in the dark, and to keep reaching until one day we stand among the stars. Happy Birthday, and thank you for everything.

Atul Gawande was right, and most professions still don't want to hear it. A 19-item checklist cut surgical deaths almost in half. Gawande is a surgeon and writer in Boston. In 2007 he led a World Health Organization project built around one question: what if operating rooms used a checklist the way pilots do? Some of the 19 items almost sound insulting to a trained surgeon. > Confirm the patient's name > Confirm which part of the body you're operating on > Ask how much blood the patient could lose > Count the sponges before the patient leaves the room They tested it in 8 hospitals in 8 cities: Toronto, New Delhi, Amman, Auckland, Manila, Ifakara in Tanzania, London and Seattle. Some had plenty of money and some had very little. They tracked 3,733 patients before the checklist and 3,955 after. Deaths fell from 1.5% to 0.8%. Major complications fell from 11% to 7%. The results came out in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2009. It wasn't a randomized trial, and the teams knew they were being studied, which can make anyone more careful. So I wouldn't give a piece of paper all the credit. But operating rooms all over the world use that checklist now. We like to think skill is what keeps people safe. Train longer, get better. But skilled people skip simple steps when they're tired or sure of themselves. Pilots found this out in 1935, when a Boeing plane crashed on takeoff and killed two test pilots. The crew had forgotten to release a control lock. Boeing didn't answer with more training. It wrote a checklist. Gawande tells the whole story in a book called The Checklist Manifesto. The expensive mistakes in most jobs come from forgetting what you already know. What's one checklist that has saved you from a stupid mistake? @sanjaynagral @imacuriosguy

This paper answers why can’t you remember being a baby? For over a century, science said you can't remember being a baby because your infant brain was just too "immature" to record anything. researchers assumed your hard drive was basically turned off for the first two years of life. But this wild paper from Yale completely rewrites how we understand human memory.. Researchers literally put awake babies (between 4 and 25 months old) into an fMRI scanner to watch their brains process new visual experiences in real-time. and what they found is mindblowing.. the infant hippocampus isn't turned off at all. it is actively firing, capturing, and encoding episodic memories. they proved that babies with higher hippocampal activity during a new experience formed a highly stable memory trace. the babies are recording the data. the memory of your first birthday, your first steps, the exact layout of the room you slept in.. it was all successfully saved to your brain. so why can't you remember it? the paper concludes that infantile amnesia isn't an "encoding" problem.. it is a "retrieval" problem. your brain recorded everything perfectly. but as you grew, your brain underwent massive developmental shifts, like explosive neurogenesis (the rapid birth of new neurons), which completely restructured your neural networks. the pathways to access those early files got buried or locked away. you didn't fail to make the memories.. you just lost the encryption key to open them. somewhere deep in your hippocampus, the exact first-person memory of being a 1-year-old might still be sitting there. you just can't access the file anymore.. @imacuriosguy

Chile is 4,270 km long, farther than a flight from New York to Los Angeles, and on average just 177 km wide, a bit more than London to Birmingham. The map holds up. The country runs from 17 degrees south all the way to Cape Horn at 56, so laid over Europe it really does reach from the top of Norway to Tunisia. Moving north along the country's long spine, the first thing you'll see is the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world, outside the polar regions. NASA says some areas get as little as 1 to 3 mm of rain annually, and there are some weather stations that have never recorded a drop. With such an environment, it's not hard to see why Chile has become a hub for astrophysics, using its dry air and dark skies. Its observatories say the country now accounts for almost 40% of all human observing power and with the new telescopes coming online, this will soon pass 60% by 2030. A report from the USGS published in 2026 states that Chile mined around 5.3 million tonnes of copper in 2025, around 23% of the world's supply, with second in line, Congo, at 3.2 million tonnes. When it comes to lithium, Chile has the largest reserves, around 9.2 million tonnes, of the world's total 37 million tonnes. I thought Chile was the second largest producer, but it turns out it fell to third in 2025, at 56,000 tonnes, behind Australia and China. In the south of the country lies the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, an ice sheet of around 13,000 square km, mostly within Chile and yet nearly the size of Northern Ireland, the largest in the southern hemisphere other than Antarctica. And the map still misses a piece. Rapa Nui, Easter Island, with nearly 1,000 moai, the giant stone heads, has been Chilean since 1888 and sits about 3,500 km out in the Pacific, which on that overlay would park it about twice as far out as Iceland.

“We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

We need a trauma scan as it is very complex. It can appear as unclear pains, gastric issues, anxiety, or irritability. Most importantly it feels like a constant feeling of lack of safety. [Psychology, Trauma, Relationships, Mental Health, Healing Journey, Self Awareness]

The next pandemic is Brainrot. People will become illiterate with zero attention span in next five years.