Insights

Insight | Famine as a weapon: from Stalin's Holodomor to Yemen's hunger wards

Norman Naimark explains the Holodomor, Stalin's terror famine in Ukraine, and what counts as genocide, Michael Malice tells the story of the Holodomor and the journalists who looked away, and Skye Fitzgerald describes hunger as a weapon of war in Yemen and the political decisions behind it. Seen together, they show that mass starvation can be a choice made by people in power, which changes who should be held responsible for it.

Human Rights

22 min read

Insight | Written for people first: readability, indentation and great Python code

Guido van Rossum describes programs as recipes written for two audiences and explains why readability matters, Chris Lattner weighs Python's strengths and the indentation debate while building Mojo on top of it, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python gives whole sections to writing and reading great code. Together they show why the people who build and teach Python treat code as something humans must read, not only something a machine must run.

Insight | Do it first thing: why habit builders give the morning to what matters

Mel Robbins makes doing a new habit in the morning one of her five systems for making it stick and builds her Million Dollar Morning around moving and making progress before checking the phone, Robin Sharma's The 5AM Club argues that owning your first hour can transform your whole life, and John Grisham tells how one page a day at 5 a.m. turned a small-town lawyer into a bestselling novelist. Placing the habit that matters most before the day's demands arrive is a simple scheduling choice anyone can try.

Habits

23 min read

Insight | Melatonin as the body's calendar: light, seasons and mood

Andrew Huberman's light episodes describe melatonin as the body's seasonal calendar, his episode on time perception calls circannual entrainment a calendar written in melatonin, his office-hours answers link seasons, melatonin, serotonin and mood, and Samer Hattar takes up night waking, melatonin and seasons with him. Seeing melatonin as a signal of the time of year, not just a sleep switch, helps explain why mood shifts with the seasons.

21 min read

Insight | How to spot a regime closing in: the machinery of authoritarian control

Alex Gladstein explains how to spot an authoritarian regime and describes surveillance as digital Leninism, Norman Naimark discusses ideology and the dictator's playbook, Abbas Amanat walks through Iran's machinery of repression and internet shutdowns, William L. Shirer traces Hitler's legal road to dictatorship, and Michael Malice shows how Soviet leaders relied on scapegoats and propaganda. Knowing the recurring tools of control helps readers recognize the loss of rights while it is still under way.

Human Rights

Conflict and Geopolitics

30 min read

Insight | Racing mind at bedtime: wind-down rituals that quiet the brain

Rebecca Robbins, Mel Robbins, Gina Poe and Walker each recommend a deliberate buffer before bed, from a fixed wind-down ritual to phrases and tasks that get the mind off itself. The common thread is that sleep cannot be forced, only prepared for.

Insight | Too much sleep: when long nights are a warning sign

Walker and Attia both address oversleeping, noting that very long sleep is often a marker of poor sleep quality, illness or depression. It corrects the idea that more time in bed is always better.

Insight | What big tech gives to open source, and what it takes

Mark Zuckerberg and Yann LeCun explain why Meta gives its AI models away, while Jean-Baptiste Kempf and Kieran Kunhya describe how large companies lean on FFmpeg and VLC and add to their maintainers' load. Set side by side, they show the two faces of corporate involvement in open source and why the relationship is not simply generous or exploitative.

14 min read

Insight | Behaviors first, then magnesium, apigenin and theanine: the sleep supplement order

Huberman's sleep toolkit and supplement framework and Walker's review of the evidence agree that supplements come after light, timing and temperature, and that the options should be tried one at a time. It gives readers a sober way to judge sleep products without relying on melatonin.

27 min read

Insight | Sleeping on a problem: how dreams and REM produce creative answers

Walker, Poe, Jandial and Rick Rubin describe sleep as a state in which the brain links distant ideas, which is why solutions and new ideas often appear after a night's sleep or on waking. It gives creative workers a reason to capture ideas on waking and to schedule hard problems before sleep.

17 min read

Insight | Who decides what stays up: Zuckerberg, Wales and Hotz on pressure and control

Mark Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales describe how Meta and Wikipedia respond when governments push on content and data, and their answers differ because one runs a company with staff and servers and the other a volunteer project with no advertisers. George Hotz, after a short stint inside Twitter, does not discuss government pressure there; his argument is that any single decider, state or owner, is the problem, and that filtering should belong to each user.

14 min read

Insight | Where software speed really comes from, according to people who deliver it

Guido van Rossum explains how Python 3.11 got 10 to 60 percent faster, Chris Lattner explains where Mojo's speedups come from, and the FFmpeg developers defend handwritten assembly. Their accounts show that performance is won at different layers, from the interpreter to the compiler to hand-tuned code, and that none of them is obsolete.

17 min read

Insight | Self-hypnosis for insomnia: a tool for falling back asleep

Psychiatrist David Spiegel describes clinical hypnosis as a way to calm the body and return to sleep, and Huberman uses hypnosis as a deliberate rest tool in his own routine. It offers a drug-free option for people whose problem is an overactive mind at night.

15 min read

Insight | How to get more deep sleep: the few things that move it

Huberman's answers on slow-wave sleep and Walker's account of what deep sleep does point to the same short list: remove alcohol, late caffeine and late meals, time exercise well and keep the timing of sleep steady. Deep sleep carries growth hormone release and physical repair, so it is worth protecting directly.

Insight | When you train shapes how you sleep: exercise timing rules

Andy Galpin, Walker, Hattar and Huberman discuss how morning or afternoon exercise supports sleep while late, stimulant-fueled sessions can delay it. For people who can only train at night, they describe how to limit the damage.

Insight | Don't Trust Your Sleep Score Too Much: Poe, Huberman and Attia on Trackers

Gina Poe and Andrew Huberman say consumer trackers only estimate sleep stages, about 70% accurate at best, and that the score itself changes how rested people feel the next day. All three still use trackers, and advise reading the numbers as averages and prompts to adjust habits, next to how your body actually feels.

15 min read

Insight | Is six hours enough, and can you recover from years of short sleep?

In live Q&As and with Walker, Huberman takes up how much sleep individuals really need, whether lost sleep can be made up and what improves after years of short nights. The answers replace a single eight-hour rule with a way to judge personal need.

Insight | No sunrise, no problem: getting morning light in dark winters

Huberman's Q&As and his daily-routine episodes and pulmonologist Roger Seheult address what to do when the sun is not up or winter days are short, from bright artificial light to getting outside whenever daylight arrives. It keeps the morning light habit workable for people at high latitudes and early risers.

Insight | Sleep is immune medicine: what one bad night does to your defenses

Immunologist Max Krummel, Walker and Huberman's episodes on immunity and on colds and flu all describe sleep as a period when the immune system is tuned and restored, and short sleep as a reliable way to get sick more often. It makes sleep the first step in avoiding and recovering from infections.