You’ve just been put in charge of a particularly audacious project at work. Your boss says you have to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and then train it to recite passages from Shakespeare. How do you begin? The question comes [...]

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau made a famous pilgrimage to Walden Pond in Massachusetts to live in a tiny cabin that he built in the woods. He went to the woods, as he wrote, “to live deliberately to front only the essential facts [...]

That’s the choice that Neo faces in the movie The Matrix. The rebel leader Morpheus tells him that if he takes the blue pill, “the story ends.” Neo will wake up in his bed and believe whatever he wants to believe. But if [...]

Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken might be one of the most popular poems of all time. If the title doesn’t ring a bell, the last stanza should: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads [...]

Over the course of my life, I’ve spent countless days waiting in single-file lines at United States embassies and border crossings. Each time, I’d react in Pavlovian fashion. As I approached the single pane of opaque glass occupied by an officer in a [...]

I recently developed what I would consider a healthy obsession with the poetry of Nayyirah Waheed. I’ve never been a poetry-reading person—making room only for the occasional Rumi—which is somewhat ironic since my first name (Ozan) is Turkish for poet. Yet, the simplicity [...]

This past summer, I lugged across the Atlantic a big, heavy suitcase filled with nothing but books (here’s a photo of it). Several puzzled readers justifiably asked me why I hadn’t invested in a Kindle. In every other aspect of my life, I’m [...]

James Carville and Paul Begala tell a story about the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain. “But it turns out [...]

It’s been one year since I started the Famous Failures podcast, where I interview the world’s most interesting people about their failures and what they learned from them. As you might imagine, asking guests to appear on the show has made for some [...]

I’m not a morning person. To me, sunrises feel as energizing as a root canal. To prepare myself for what felt like a recurring battle each morning, I would set my alarm clock thirty minutes fast. You know the rest of the story. [...]