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Philosophy
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
The technology might be much closer than you'd think.
Before we can build the future, we have to imagine it.
These expert-recommended books reveal how big ideas can shape — and sometimes redefine — human progress.
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.
Barriers to energy abundance — and how to overcome them — were front and center at Progress Conference 2025.
The case that a bipartisan movement structured around progress and reform may be reaching critical mass.
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.
Weird-looking galaxies, with tentacle-like tails or prominent dual streams, appear like jellyfish or bunny ears. But that’s just the start.
When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.
In a world of fast answers, leadership shaped by suffering is radical — and transformative.
Digital tools are pulling us away from fixed texts and back toward fluid, interactive communication.
"Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end."
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?
Ryan Holiday on why wisdom depends on failure, experimentation, and the courage to admit when we’re wrong.
NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.
Former tech founder Scott Britton wants to shatter the binary myth that separates driving ambition from inner development.
Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.
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.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
Metacognition — the ability to think about your thinking — can help you learn faster and make better decisions.
Panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff, PhD on mysticism and the future of faith.
John Templeton Foundation
Times dilate and lengths contract near the speed of light. Bizarre and confusing? Sure. But under relativity, it can't be any other way.
In this excerpt from "The Shortest History of AI," Toby Walsh explores the history of the Logic Theorist, the first AI to prove mathematical theorems.
How did Jobs revolutionize tech, not once but continually? Aspiring innovators — and today's Apple — should look to The Bard and seek out singularity.