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. [...]

The devil’s advocate has a long and distinguished history. In the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church established a new practice for vetting individuals proposed for sainthood. Under this practice, a promoter of the faith would be assigned to vet the candidates and [...]

Amelia Boone was standing in a wetsuit, clutching her knees, the wind whipping against her face on a frigid Chicago winter morning. She was running on Lake Shore Drive, while dunking herself in and out of the icy waters of Lake Michigan. Observers [...]

In 1637, Pierre de Fermat scribbled a note on a textbook margin that would baffle mathematicians for more than three centuries. Fermat had a theory. He proposed that there’s no solution to the formula an + bn = cn for any n greater [...]

In her brilliant book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert tells the fable of a great saint who would lead his followers in meditation. There was a slight problem. Just as the followers were dropping into their zen moment, they would get disrupted by a [...]

A human year equates to seven dog years. A man’s maternal grandfather determines whether he will go bald. Dietary cholesterol raises blood cholesterol. We use only 10% of our brains. These statements are all false. The dog-to-human age ratio has been repeated since [...]

“You’re leaving academia. I can’t believe it!” exclaimed a good friend and fellow law professor. “No,” I corrected him. “I’m not leaving academia. I’m starting a blog and writing books for the general public. That’s all.” “But you’re ruining your scholarly significance,” he [...]

No one is above self-delusion. This thought kept buzzing in my head as I was doing research related to a book I’m currently writing. Brilliant scientists—on a regular basis—fool themselves. We tend to think that we’re above cognitive biases and subjective distortion. The [...]

The 27-year-old director had a major problem in his hands. The star of his movie, Bruce, was high maintenance—even by Hollywood standards. Bruce was a mechanical shark, lovingly named after the director’s lawyer. But the shark couldn’t do the one thing he was [...]