Showing results by author "Matthew Syed" in All Categories

In the vein of the international bestselling Freakonomics, award-winning journalist Matthew Syed reveals the hidden clues to success—in sports, business, school, and just about anything else that you’d want to be great at. Fans of Predictably Irrational and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping...

Once a watchword for African Americans in the early 1900s, 'woke' is now used as an insult across the political spectrum, and it has become synonymous with our era of angry debate. As the word has spread, what people mean by it has become less clear than ever. Award-winning journalist and author Matthew Syed is on a mission to uncover the roots of this social phenomenon and, in this series, he follows the evolution of 'woke' through five key stories.

What can Roger Federer teach us about the secret of longevity? What do the All Blacks have in common with improvised jazz musicians? What can cognitive neuroscientists tell us about what happens to the brains of sportspeople when they perform? And why did Johan Cruyff believe that beauty was...

Forty years ago, Neil Postman’s landmark book Amusing Ourselves to Death compared two dystopian visions – those of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley – and concluded that the latter had proved most prescient. Rather than oppression by Big Brother, humanity was in danger of being overcome by our ‘appetite for distractions’: technologies that tap into our basest instincts, taking away our ability to think and destroying our critical faculties.