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Adaptation Strategies
“The Chinese Job”: Spain’s wild 1580s plan to conquer the world — via Beijing
The plan — conquer China and push west to attack the Ottomans — was peak imperial hubris, as the Spanish themselves eventually realized.
Every tree, star, and cloud is a compass — if you know how to read them
Natural navigator Tristan Gooley joins us to discuss the philosophy of reading nature’s hidden clues — and how relearning this ancient skill can help us see the world, and ourselves, with greater awareness.
Will AI save us or destroy us?
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
The “intoxication thesis”: The evolutionary benefits of getting drunk
Getting drunk might be bad for you but good for us.
Are young workers canaries in the AI coal mine?
Early warning signs show AI is eating into the entry-level job market — a potential harbinger of things to come.
11 min
Jesse Eisenberg: How to rewire your anxiety into authenticity
“The way my mind works is just out of anxiety and catastrophization.”
The beauty of writing in public
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Ian McEwan: “Tourism is a wonderful spectacle of mass derangement.”
Here are three ways to do it better.
3 min
Fearing death keeps us from living. 3 experts explain.
Biologist Tyler Volk PhD, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson MD, and palliative care physician BJ Miller MD, reveal how confronting mortality can improve the way we live.
Unlikely Collaborators
Why your intuition, imagination, and emotion will outlast AI
A dialogue with Angus Fletcher — author of the bestseller "Primal Intelligence" — exploring the unique engines of human progress.
1 min
The evolution of laziness: Why humans resist the gym
“Nothing about human behavior makes sense except in the light of culture and in anthropology, and we need to understand the cultural component to our behaviors as well.”
What the forest can teach us about resilience
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
1 min
Sean Carroll explains why physics is both simple and impossible
“I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students.”
How a dime-sized bone rewrote the story of human evolution
In “The Secret History of Denisovans,” Silvana Condemi and François Savatier trace the story of our mysterious hominin ancestor.
What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness
After the trauma of a high-risk medical procedure, Eric Markowitz discovered a kind of consciousness that lives not in thought — but in presence.
20 min
How two freak accidents shaped human evolution
“So many things could have happened in a different way that we wouldn't be here at all, both individually, for sure, and certainly as a species.”
Leadership philosophy: Why Machiavelli’s “virtù” fits hand-in-glove with AI
Author and geopolitical strategist Paulo Cardoso do Amaral urges us to ask: Will we shape AI with wisdom, or will AI reshape us with strategy?
The single most amazing fact about the Universe
No matter what it is that we discover about reality, the fact that reality itself can be understood remains the most amazing fact of all.
Evolution isn’t a straight line: Modern humans come from 2 ancient lineages
After more than a million years of separation, two branches of humanity reunited around 300,000 years ago, suggests new research.