There is a famous Iraqi idiom which states that if you think your opponents can eat you for dinner, then you'd better eat them for lunch. If your opponent is too big and powerful to eat you right-now, you'd better eat them for lunch before they eat you. Commitment problems from our opponents lead us to act, and that's another reason why rational man can go to war.
— Christopher BlattmanI started writing fiction because I was lonely. I was an only child, a solitary child, raised by a single working mother, which was very unusual at the time in Turkey. Literature gave me a sense of continuity, coherence; it kept my pieces together. It helped me to connect even when I felt like I didn't quite belong.
We are at a crossroads where we can either win this battle against HIV or we can lose it. The science is there, the tools are there, but what we need now is the political will and the resources to finish the job.
I think in the past, it was more of a zero sum game, and now I think we can play in a positive sum game, which really plays into the whole greenhouse concept, because we can all actually grow together and not feel like we are needing to take in order to achieve.
I'm very old-fashioned in the sense that I still feel you need a strong manufacturing sector in your economy. I was saying that in the late 1970's and early 80's and people just laughed at me. I think my day is about to turn.
This access has significantly altered what individuals and communities can accomplish, challenging traditional power dynamics. It's essentially a democratic revolution, wresting control from the conventional gatekeepers like intelligence agencies and the media.
I've never gone into a startup thinking, 'oh hey, I'm going to disrupt an industry….' I go in trying to solve a problem, and if you can effectively solve a problem, you might end up disrupting a whole industry.
If you look at the notional value of trading on our exchanges in any given year, they range from $600-700 trillion to a quadrillion (1000 trillion) dollars in total value. People can use these markets very effectively, not just for bona-fide risk hedging and transfer and risk management but also for asset allocation, portfolio management and trading strategies as well.
The minute they had a job, the minute they started working, that's when they lost the sense of being a refugee and became part of the community. That was the moment they started to regain their dignity and became independent.
It's become synonymous with clothing but ultimately fashion is anything popular in a culture at any given time.
I remember one particular interview with a boy, Peter, aged just 14. He told me how he posted on Instagram and then waited and waited for someone to like his posts. When they didn't' it made him feel awful and invisible. It's so heart-wrenching to think of that.
If you're doing anything for legacy, you might as well forget about it – even your great grandchildren will have no idea who you were or what you did. Legacy lasts 50 years maximum.
If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they're a digital manifestation of play. Video games are simply a digital form of that. They're one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species.