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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
An atheist's case for why American democracy needs a more Christlike Christianity.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
It rotates on its axis, revolves around the Sun, moves throughout the Milky Way, and gets carried by our galaxy all throughout space.
A comparison of wealth gaps in ancient empires reveals stark differences and lasting consequences.
The Gospels aren’t historical biographies but genre-defining works that blend myth, theology, and a promise of hope.
20mins
“Even if there are beliefs that we hold that are true, if we prevent people
challenging those beliefs, we will lose our understanding of why they're true.”
Many were hoping that JWST would find the first stars of all. Despite many hopeful claims, it hasn't, and probably can't. Here's how we can.
What's the point in fighting a made up monster?
Here in our Universe, time passes at a fixed rate for all observers: one second-per-second. Before the Big Bang, things were very different.
The strange, undulating sound of mathematics.
Experts and Big Think writers recommend their favorite reads for diving deeper into the history and perspectives found in the Book of Books.
The platform is a digital Royal Society for today's greatest minds — and it could play an essential role in shaping the next civilization.
Dreams of resurrecting lost species didn’t start in Hollywood or Silicon Valley.
The "Doctor Strange" director says mystery shifts your worldview — "not in a metaphorical sense, but in a deeply experiential one."
Many, from neuroscientists to philosophers to anesthesiologists, have claimed to understand consciousness. Do physicists? Does anyone?
English could settle into a state of "diglossia" where a gulf exists between the written form and its spoken varieties, but the two are bound into a single tongue.
With stars, gas, and dark matter, galaxies come in a great array of sizes. This new one, Ursa Major III/UNIONS 1, is the smallest by far.
11mins
"We are all in orbit around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. How big is this collection of stars? Somewhere between 200 and 400 billion suns in the Milky Way galaxy, about 100,000 light years across."
According to Tolkien, fantasy requires a deep imagination known as "sub-creation." And the genre reflects a fundamental truth of being human.
The fact that our Universe's expansion is accelerating implies that dark energy exists. But could it be even weirder than we've imagined?