Whales are highly efficient at carbon storage. When they die, each whale sequesters an average of 30 tons of carbon dioxide, taking that carbon out of the atmosphere for centuries. For comparison, the average tree absorbs only 48 pounds of CO2 a year. From a climate perspective, each whale is the marine equivalent of thousands of trees. Whales also help sequester carbon by fertilizing the ocean as they release nutrient-rich waste, in turn increasing phytoplankton populations, which also sequester carbon — leading some scientists to call them the "engineers of marine ecosystems." In 2019, economists from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated the value of the ecosystem services provided by each whale at over $2 million USD. They called for a new global program of economic incentives to return whale populations to preindustrial whaling levels as one example of a "nature-based solution" to climate change. Calls are now being made for a global whale restoration program, to slow down climate change.

From an organizational viewpoint, one of the most fascinating examples of how any organization may contain many different types of culture is to recognize the functional operations of different departments within the organization. The varying departments and divisions within an organization will inevitably view any given situation from their own biased and prejudiced perspective. A department and its members will acquire "tunnel vision" which disallows them to see things as others see them. The very structure of organizations can create conflict. The choice of whether the structure is "mechanistic" or "organic" can have a profound influence on conflict management. A mechanistic structure has a vertical hierarchy with many rules, many procedures, and many levels of management involved in decision making. Organic structures are more horizontal in nature, where decision making is less centralized and spread across the plane of the organization.

An excellent alternative to calming traffic is removing it. Some cities reserve an extensive network of lanes and streets for bikes, pedestrians, and the occasional service vehicle. This motivates people to travel by bike rather than by car, making streets safer for everyone. As bicycles become more popular in a city, planners can convert more automobile lanes and entire streets to accommodate more of them. Nevertheless, even the most bikeable cities still require motor vehicle lanes for taxis, emergency vehicles, and delivery trucks. Delivery vehicles are frequently a target of animus, but they are actually an essential component to making cities greener. A tightly packed delivery truck is a far more efficient transporter of goods than several hybrids carrying a few shopping bags each. Distributing food and other goods to neighborhood vendors allows them to operate smaller stores close to homes so that residents can walk, rather than drive, to get their groceries.

You hear again and again that some of the greatest composers were misunderstood in their own day. Not everyone could understand the compositions of Beethoven, Brahms, or Stravinsky in their day. The reason for this initial lack of acceptance is unfamiliarity. The musical forms, or ideas expressed within them, were completely new. And yet, this is exactly one of the things that makes them so great. Effective composers have their own ideas. Have you ever seen the classic movie Amadeus? The composer Antonio Salieri is the "host" of this movie; he's depicted as one of the most famous nongreat composers — he lived at the time of Mozart and was completely overshadowed by him. Now, Salieri wasn't a bad composer; in fact, he was a very good one. But he wasn't one of the world's great composers because his work wasn't original. What he wrote sounded just like what everyone else was composing at the time.

Every time a new medium comes along — whether it's the invention of the printed book, or TV, or SNS — and you start to use it, it's like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently. So when you start to watch television, before you absorb the message of any particular TV show — whether it's Wheel of Fortune or The Wire — you start to see the world as being shaped like television itself. That's why Marshall McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along — a new way for humans to communicate — it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it's about surfaces and appearances.

Concepts are vital to human survival, but we must also be careful with them because concepts open the door to essentialism. They encourage us to see things that aren't present. Stuart Firestein opens his book, Ignorance, with an old proverb, "It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat." This statement beautifully sums up the search for essences. History has many examples of scientists who searched fruitlessly for an essence because they used the wrong concept to guide their hypotheses. Firestein gives the example of luminiferous ether, a mysterious substance that was thought to fill the universe so that light would have a medium to move through. The ether was a black cat, writes Firestein, and physicists had been theorizing in a dark room, and then experimenting in it, looking for evidence of a cat that did not exist.

While social media attention is potentially an instrument to achieve ends like elite celebrity, some content creators desire ordinary fame as a social end in itself. Not unlike reality television stars, social media celebrities are often criticized for not having skills and talents associated with traditional, elite celebrity, such as acting or singing ability. This criticism highlights the fact that digital content creators face real barriers to crossing over to the sphere of elite celebrity. However, the criticism also misses the point that the phenomenon of ordinary celebrity reconstructs the meaning of fame. The elite celebrity is symbolized by the metaphor of the star, characterized by mystery and hierarchical distance and associated with naturalized qualities of talent and class. The ordinary celebrity attracts attention through regular and frequent interactions with other ordinary people. Achieving ordinary fame as a social media celebrity is like doing well at a game, because in this sphere, fame is nothing more nor less than relatively high scores on attention scales, the metrics of subscribers, followers, Likes, or clicks built into social media applications.

Why do we have the illusion that cramming for an exam is the best learning strategy? Because we are unable to differentiate between the various sections of our memory. Immediately after reading our textbook or our class notes, information is fully present in our mind. It sits in our conscious working memory, in an active form. We feel as if we know it, because it is present in our short-term storage space ... but this short-term section has nothing to do with the long-term memory that we will need in order to recall the same information a few days later. After a few seconds or minutes, working memory already starts disappearing, and after a few days, the effect becomes enormous: unless you retest your knowledge, memory vanishes. To get information into long-term memory, it is essential to study the material, then test yourself, rather than spend all your time studying.