Search
History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Members
This course on strategic empathy, led by instructors like Amaryllis Fox and Liv Boeree, teaches participants to understand opposing viewpoints through "Red Teaming," while addressing cognitive biases and emphasizing the importance of historical context, cultural awareness, and ethical decision-making in complex global issues.
Members
This class explores human cognition and decision-making through insights from experts like Michio Kaku on magical thinking, Madhavan on systems-level thinking, Mlodinow on elastic thinking, Konnikova on deductive reasoning, and Summers on structured decision-making, promoting a scientific mindset for effective problem-solving.
A childhood spent under the spell of sleight-of-hand taught me skepticism, curiosity, and the habit of looking beneath appearances.
Big Think spoke with astronomer David Kipping about technosignatures, "extragalactic SETI," and being a popular science communicator in the YouTube age.
In this excerpt from "Seven Rivers," historian Vanessa Taylor explores how Ancient Egyptian pharaohs harnessed the Nile River to build empires and secure their power.
How to look cool in post-war France in black and white photos.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
2mins
Free speech may be messy, but censorship is deadly. Founder of The Future of Free Speech Jacob Mchangama explains.
The universe is filled with unlikely events, but it is also full of ways to fool ourselves.
We don't learn from history because we can't learn from history.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
It's not just an odd quirk of numbers that makes it true, but a deep mathematical insight that dates all the way back to Pythagoras.
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
Questions about our origins, biologically, chemically, and cosmically, are the most profound ones we can ask. Here are today's best answers.
Even when leaders know disruption is a smart long-term decision, the pain of transition can produce a titanic shambles. Just ask Kodak.
The fear of unleashing forces beyond control has haunted science for centuries.
The red planet, Mars, may once have been teeming with life, just as Earth is today. Finding "organics" on Mars, however, doesn't mean life.
In revolutionary Russia, a group of forward-thinking philosophers offered an alternative to both futurism and communism.
In “On Liberalism," Cass Sunstein argues that liberalism can only endure if we reclaim its core commitments and revive its spirit of freedom and hope for the future.
It's the origin of our entire observable Universe, but it's still not the very beginning of everything.