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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
It’s a lot easier to point out things that are gezellig (adjective) than it is to define gezelligheid (noun) itself.
Burj Al Babas may one day be full of wealthy vacationers, but for now it’s a ghost town in the center of Turkey.
The lack of friendship is particularly a problem for men. But there are easy ways to make friends.
8mins
A University of Oxford professor explains how conscious machines are possible.
Adolescents actively shape the transformation of religion and become the bearers of new religious patterns, worldviews, and values.
John Templeton Foundation
6mins
This is not your average dream interpreter. Nightmares, as explained by a neuroscientist.
Science isn't synonymous with technology; it's about a way of thinking.
The double-slit experiment, hundreds of years after it was first performed, still holds the key mystery at the heart of quantum physics.
Chess could perhaps be the ultimate window through which we might see how our mental powers shift during our lives.
For many years, some cosmologists embraced the idea of an eternal, steady state universe. But science triumphed over philosophical prejudice.
With a massive, charged nucleus orbited by tiny electrons, atoms are such simple objects. Miraculously, they make up everything we know.
Frozen adversity set the stage for an explosion of diversity.
Unmasking a "convenient untruth" in U.S. politics.
Try writing a novel without using the letter "e."
In 1903, a Vermont doctor bet $50 that he could cross America by car. It took him 63 days, $8,000, and 600 gallons of gas.
Mongol forces never fully conquered the continent, but they played a key role in its historical development.
4mins
“If intelligence is the ability to respond to any argument, wisdom lies in knowing which parts of an argument to respond to.” Harvard debate coach Bo Seo explains how to argue better.
It wasn't merely an act of brutality; it was a condemnation for the afterlife.
Zombies aren't a modern-day obsession. Throughout history, fear of the undead led to bizarre burial rituals all over the world.