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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Some go gently into the night. Others die less prettily in freak accidents or deadly invasions, or after a showy display.
From tribal hunts to Stonehenge and into the modern day, the peer instinct helps humans coordinate their efforts and learning.
"I am free. It's a lot of effort to be free from the prison that is in your mind, and the key is in your pocket." – Edith Eva Eger
Don't make the mistake of blindly following quantitative metrics — whether you're helping clients or looking for lunch.
1hr 15mins
“Why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years? Why is it that very sophisticated societies have been as susceptible as stone age tribes to mass delusion and the rise of destructive ideologies?”
Great tidal ranges are relatively rare on a global scale — and can be very deadly to the unsuspecting foreshore walker.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
The fabric of spacetime is four-dimensional, with three for space and only one for time. But wow, time sure is different from space!
An in-depth interview with astronomer Kelsey Johnson, whose new book, Into the Unknown, explores what remains unknown about the Universe.
"We are not our grandparents. It’s time to start thinking differently," journalist Annie Jacobsen told Big Think.
The Universe changes remarkably over time, with some entities surviving and others simply decaying away. Is this cosmic evolution at work?
The electoral reform also known as instant-runoff voting promises bridge-building and broad appeal instead of culture war and gridlock.
Modern autocracies operate "not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies," says journalist and historian Anne Applebaum.
To maintain momentum and flow, the great novelist Ernest Hemingway didn’t burn himself out — but learned when to put his work down.
Artificial intelligence is much more than image generation and smart-sounding chatbots; it's also a Nobel-worthy endeavor rooted in physics!
Historian Timothy Snyder talks with Big Think about how true liberty requires both negative and positive freedoms.