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History and Society
From Aristotle's lazy cosmology to Immanuel Kant's "scientific" racism, great minds are not immune to very bad ideas.
Are you unhappy with how various events in your life turned out? Perhaps, in a parallel Universe, things worked out very differently.
Urban legends help personify the anxieties that arise from living in a modern city.
Do we still remember what we learned in the 1940s?
How many tins of beans make a stockpile, and when does a basement become a bunker?
Instead of worshipping Yahweh, the devotees were perhaps dedicated to Mars and Jupiter.
We are not yet at the point where quantum communications can be deployed to secure the internet, but we might not be far off.
If you believe that you're perfect, then somebody else must be responsible for your failures.
Psychologists are exploring this creepy feeling of having already lived through an experience before.
We are tearing ourselves apart over gender issues, with the result that the problems of boys and men are left untreated.
1.9 billion years ago, a star's explosive death created a black hole. Its light just arrived at Earth. But did it set a cosmic record?
After 70 years, "The Power of Positive Thinking" remains incredibly popular, even though its critics find the book to be mostly fluff.
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Don’t take the prodigy pathway. Become a broad thinker instead.
You can buy over 400,000 products tagged “witch” on Etsy, from candles to spell bottles to pentagram necklaces.
Humanity is poised to pass the 8 billion milestone mid-November, but population growth is actually slowing down.
Cooperation was the first technology.
The world has improved in mind-blowing ways.
What if your best friend was an informant?
Which one is the funniest?
Between 30% and 50% of the US population says they believe in ghosts.
Living is about staying busy.
We got lucky with our evolutionary history.
The acceptance of fashionable nonsense is a threat to Enlightenment values and public health.
NASA is creating a planet habitability index, and Earth may not be at the top. With our current data, ranking habitability is guesswork.
When the great American tradition of the road trip meets the great Jewish tradition of the deli, we get the Great American Deli Schlep.
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.
All nations have founding myths, but none are quite like Russia's.