In this excerpt from The Intimate Animal, Justin Garcia shows why curiosity and self-disclosure — not attraction alone — help build intimacy and sustain it over time.

I'm definitely a Kitsune, but would a Kitsune actually say that?

These cultural lies make normal struggle feel like failure. A habit of experimentation makes it feel like progress.

“The problem with cognitive scripts is when we use them to make more important decisions in our lives, we let our choices be driven by those stories that we have internalized that tell us how we're supposed to behave in a certain situation.”

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Metacognition — the ability to think about your thinking — can help you learn faster and make better decisions.

Life's "in-between" stages pack unique cognitive benefits — if you know how to tap into them.

Humans, unlike robots, can't produce identical results consistently, but Pulitzer Prize-winning author Charles Duhigg suggests we can channel our natural curiosity and creativity toward achieving our personal goals and passions.

A childhood spent under the spell of sleight-of-hand taught me skepticism, curiosity, and the habit of looking beneath appearances.

Science helps us imagine the vastness of space and time — and our small but meaningful place within it.

Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar on why the simple act of asking questions (without needing a reason) is one of the most powerful things a human can do.

Stuck on a hamster wheel of mindless social media scrolling? Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how to consciously redirect your reward system.

“By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, what you can do is letting go of any definition of success, letting go of that binary results that you're looking for, and instead focusing something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore.”

From Apple to Airbnb to OpenAI the generalist mindset has been an invaluable source of advantage — and we can all learn from these successes.

Clarity driven by anxiety rarely lasts.

What made Leonardo da Vinci last wasn’t magic — it was process — and his study of fluids can help us win the long game.

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Curiosity is often considered a personality quirk. Neuroscience paints a different picture.

Reading obituaries can boost creativity by exposing you to distant ideas, fueling the associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs.

"Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions."

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

"Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language."

Barry Ritholtz — market commentator, founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and podcast host — shares what really trips investors up.

“It’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

"We try to stick to routines and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process. There is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved."

When your life’s truth and the reality you live become out of sync, you risk falling into an "anxiety spiral."

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

Neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses the lasting benefits of uncertainty, curiosity, and the experimental mindset.

Rather than allowing technology to exacerbate stress and disconnection, we can use it to actively support our wellbeing.

An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.