Ideas

Neuroscientist shares the tells that expose people faking their intelligence

When the loudest person in the room isn’t actually saying much.

If you find yourself being talked at more than talked with, you may be sitting across from someone who’s faking their intellectual prowess. Like a writer who deploys ostentatious clusters of needlessly polysyllabic, grandiloquent, and lexically hypertrophic verbiage to hide their own insecurities (ahem), these talkers often treat conversation as sport instead of discourse.

As Erik Barnes reports in this story, neuroscientist-turned-musician and comedian Alex Riordan says pseudo-intellectuals tend to follow a predictable pattern. They talk past you, leaning on jargon or rhetorical sleight of hand to steer the conversation away from your actual point. The goal isn’t understanding. It’s control.

The right move is often a polite nod and a quick escape. But if you’re feeling a little mischievous, Riordan has a move that stops fake-smart talkers cold.

Previous Results

Admin Nights are catching on. Have some friends over, pour some wine, get caught up on your bills. How do GOOD readers feel about the idea? They don’t love it.

• Catching up with friends AND my bills? I'm in! (25.6%)

• With my friends, we wouldn't get anything done. (29.5%)

• I'll pay my bills in anguished silence like an adult, thanks. (44.9%)

Reader FaithyM summed up the mood perfectly. “Nobody needs to know my business. I pay my bills throughout the month, in full and on time.”

Good People

In 1984, Maya Angelou shared her unconventional method for conquering fear

The poets, as usual, get to the truth before science can catch up.

Long before therapy-speak and mindfulness became everyday language, acclaimed poet Maya Angelou spoke openly about fear, mortality, and presence on daytime television. As Mark Wales reports, Maya shares her thoughts in a clip from 1984, and she admits she is afraid all the time.

That acceptance, she explains, did not make her withdrawn or self-focused. It did the opposite. Once she truly understood mortality, she could be fully present. Not abstractly. Not spiritually. Right there, in the room, bringing everything she had to the moment.

The clip is brief, steady, and strangely modern.

Culture

After Def Leppard’s drummer tragically lost his arm, Phil Collins sent him an 'incredible' letter

Collins’ letter landed with the sort of perfect timing only great drummers can really appreciate.

It’s the sort of monstrous twist of fate that feels more like hack fiction than reality, but in 1984, in the aftermath of Def Leppard’s first breakout hit, their drummer, Rick Allen, lost his left arm in a car accident.

Understandably, after such a cruel turn of events, Allen felt like giving up. That’s when, as Ryan Reed reports, fellow drummer Phil Collins sent a letter that changed everything.

One ring to rule them all!* Until January 8, 1984, when the phone rang in an American home, the company handling that call was AT&T. For decades, American Telephone and Telegraph controlled the lines into people’s houses and used its monopoly power to squash both innovation and competition. Consumers had no choices. They couldn’t own their own phones, and emerging technologies like answering machines were outright forbidden.

Lawsuits and renewed anti-monopoly fervor eventually led U.S. District Judge Harold Greene to issue his “Modified Final Judgment.” And 44 years ago today, Ma Bell was broken up.

The effects were enormous, and they came fast. By the end of the 1980s, long-distance rates had dropped by roughly 40 percent. Home users suddenly had access to a wider variety of devices, which helped drive the spread of answering machines, wireless handsets, and eventually dial-up internet.

AT&T didn’t disappear. Bell Labs’ manufacturing arm spun out as Lucent in 1996, later merging into Alcatel-Lucent and ultimately Nokia. Meanwhile, the Baby Bells and new long-distance competitors continued to push innovation forward. Today’s cell-service-saturated world traces directly back to the moment that the monopoly cracked.

Today, like the T-1000 from Terminator, phone companies are slowly re-forming and other industries are racing down the same path as mergers accelerate, with layoffs almost always following. The entertainment industry alone has shrunk from about eight major studios three decades ago to just five today, with more consolidation likely ahead as Warner Bros. Discovery fields takeover bids.

Looking back at how the Ma Bell breakup played out, it’s hard not to wonder if it might be time to dust off the old monopoly-busting hammer.

* - It was too much to expect of myself to resist the Lord of the Rings references two days in a row.

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