The best gifts are always those that you didn’t ask for. For example, that set of pots and pans is great, but really it’s every time you wear that cashmere sweater that you feel like you’re opening up a present all over again. I would say that the website The Edge is similar to this old cliché in that it’s a website I didn’t know I needed in my life until a week ago when I learned about it, but now that I have it in my life I am not quite sure how I ever lived fully without it being there. Moreover, it asks questions that I never knew needed to be answered and yet, having read some of the answers to the questions that it asks, I am eternally grateful that someone out there in charge of The Edge did in fact have the curiosity of mind to ask these questions.
I am being confusing. Basically, The Edge asks some of the smartest people in the world provocative questions and then posts the answers on the website. The site’s tagline is, in fact, "To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The participants on the site include some of the foremost names in journalism, business, technology, psychology, art, you name it. The answers they come up with can be mundane, but they can also be provocative, poetic, funny or sad.
On my most recent visit to the site, people had been asked the question, "What is your formula? Your equation? Your algorithm?" The answers ran the gamut. A Nobel Prize winner in Economics answered with a simple equation about success and talent and luck whereas a Harvard physics professor took the opportunity to scrawl out a solution to Einstein’s equation of gravity. It’s just goes to show that what they say is true: It really never hurts to ask.