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History and Society
Real progress demands rules built for uncertainty — not for the few innovations dominating today’s tech landscape.
Preindustrial life wasn’t simple or serene — it was filthy, violent, and short. The Industrial Revolution was imperfect, but it was progress.
Common law has long balanced innovation and accountability. Can it do the same for AI?
To build a better world, we first have to understand how change actually happens.
From treating specific diseases to targeting aging itself, Progress Conference 2025 explored the many routes to extending life.
At the foundation of America’s progress movement are immigrants who still believe this country can build.
History shows that progress often depends on activists at both ends of the spectrum.
Jennifer Pahlka, author and Code for America founder, on what comes after Elon Musk’s failed attempt at government efficiency — and how we can modernize federal agencies to improve people’s lives.
The case that a bipartisan movement structured around progress and reform may be reaching critical mass.
2mins
From science to philosophy, three perspectives explore why humans can’t stop asking “why.” Our search for purpose, they suggest, is less about finding answers and more about learning how to move forward.
Unlikely Collaborators
Wavelengths stretch, distances grow, and temperatures cool as the Universe expands with time. How are the various cosmic parameters related?
Leaders in China hope that AI and robotics can finally resolve the flaws of a centralized planned economy. But US technoculture has an edge.
In this excerpt from The Breath of the Gods, Simon Winchester explores how the Sumerians first named the wind and shaped our early understanding of the natural world.
41mins
“Progress happens when we choose to make it happen. It happens through choice and effort. And ultimately, to make progress happen, we have to believe in it.”
When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.
For over 10 billion years, the cosmic star-formation rate has been dropping and dropping. Someday, the final star in the Universe will die.
Digital tools are pulling us away from fixed texts and back toward fluid, interactive communication.
13mins
“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”
"Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end."
1hr 24mins
“There are at least three very much interrelated misconceptions about trauma right now.”
In this excerpt from "The First Eight," Congressman Jim Clyburn shares the story of Robert Smalls, the man whose audience with Lincoln may have saved the Union army.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
In 2017, a kilonova sent light and gravitational waves across the Universe. Here on Earth, there was a 1.7 second signal arrival delay. Why?
Governance scholar and University of Pittsburgh professor Jennifer Brick Murtazashvili, Ph.D. on the forces that decide whether conflicted nations unify or unravel.
John Templeton Foundation
Dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang are all part of a solid scientific foundation. Here's why popular media often claims otherwise.
13mins
“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”
Until the late 20th century, there wasn't a truly universal standard. Under our current definition, everyone agrees on what "one meter" is.
The great books aren’t just classics — they’re cultural Schelling points that give our minds a place to meet up in the world of ideas.
10mins
“When you start to accept that you have profound influence on the world, but very limited control, you start to see the world differently.”
Fibonacci’s "Liber Abaci" not only revolutionized commerce — it also helped nudge the world towards reasoned, quantitative enquiry.