Ryan Holiday, the New York Times bestselling author of Stillness Is the Key and modern Stoic philosopher, has carved a unique path in the overpopulated realm of self-improvement by utilizing ancient wisdom. It may seem like an odd career combination, but his journey from marketin … | Continue reading
Across the animal kingdom, hair and fur are exceedingly common. Although these alpacas are all covered in fur, the thickness, curliness, and length of the fur varies from animal to animal and from location to location within an individual animal. The size and shape of the hair fo … | Continue reading
During the 2010s, a group of nonprofits began organizing coding workshops for unemployed coal miners from West Virginia. The plan, futurist and author Amy Webb explained at EmTech MIT 2024, an annual conference on emerging technologies, was to retrain the disenfranchised workers … | Continue reading
This is T-Minus, where Freethink counts down the biggest developments in space, from new rocket launches to discoveries that advance our understanding of the universe and our place in it. Humanity is reaching new heights in space exploration. Make sure you’re part of the journey … | Continue reading
Why is it that some people seem to get over breakups really quickly, and others seem to dwell on them for ages? What turns a breakup into a heartbreak? – Ryan I often wonder what motivates Everyday Philosophy submissions. What made someone ask this question? Why turn to emailing … | Continue reading
Part of existing as an “organic entity” such as a human is that we live our lives by cycles: Day, night. Winter, summer, Growth, decay. Sometimes we’re active, other times we need rest. But algorithms and computers never need rest – they are ‘on’ all the time. In a world that is … | Continue reading
Relationships are a murky business. They deal in high stakes and high emotions and can often feel like sailing a roiling sea with a wildly spinning compass. Every action and every utterance is scrutinized and reinterpreted, and any kind of certainty is squinted at through a glass … | Continue reading
The 20th century, among the many other things it brought to humanity, brought with it a series of revolutions about the Universe. Newton’s gravity was replaced with Einstein’s general relativity: a theory that has withstood every challenge for over a century. The quantum revoluti … | Continue reading
With its latest space mission successfully launched, NASA is set to return for a close-up investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa. In mid-October, the Europa Clipper lifted off via SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on a mission that will take a close look at Europa’s icy surface. Five ye … | Continue reading
As we inch closer to the possibility of making first contact with an alien civilization, it’s worth wondering how that contact would go. As much as we’d like “them” to be benign and respectful of other life forms, we might be in for a big surprise. Technical prowess and ethical e … | Continue reading
How many stars can a planet successfully orbit before gravitational interactions compel it to be ejected? For a long time, we had only our own Solar System to look to for actual data, as we were the only star we knew of with planets around it at all. It wasn’t until the 1990s tha … | Continue reading
This week, Lenny Rachitsky spoke with Naomi Gleit, Meta’s Head of Product, who joined as employee #29 back in 2004 when Meta (then Facebook) had just one million users. Today, Meta has nearly 70,000 employees — and over 3.2 billion daily users. The conversation dives into Meta’s … | Continue reading
Despite his international renown, we know terribly little about Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from a couple of Florentine court records about a dropped sodomy accusation, and — of course — his own notebooks, his name survives primarily through his work, his idiosyncratic drawings, pai … | Continue reading
When we look at planet Earth, we see a blue world with a mix of oceans and continents, clear and cloudy skies covered in photosynthetic greenery, and many other signatures of life’s presence. Mars, for comparison, is a much smaller planet that’s largely taken on a rusted red colo … | Continue reading
If we want to reduce the risks of disasters, we need to track where they’re happening; what types of events they are; their human and economic impacts; and how these trends change over time. High-quality data helps us see patterns in the data on factors such as increased resilien … | Continue reading
For a long time, only men sat on corporate boards — those “top of the ladder” advisory bodies that are often highly paid and never seem happier than when in the middle of a three-hour meeting. Strangely, there are often around nine or ten people on these boards. And, for a long t … | Continue reading
There’s a beautiful scene in the 1993 film Blue by Krzysztof Kieślowski, one of the most iconic and influential film directors of all time. Juliet Binoche holds a sugar cube carefully over a cup of coffee, delicately dipping one small corner in, attending to it. The coffee satura … | Continue reading
From here on Earth, our views of the Universe are impressive and expansive, but are also fundamentally limited. We can build observatories as large as we like — even on the highest, driest mountaintops our planet has to offer — with instruments that are as up-to-date and sophisti … | Continue reading
As Albert Einstein famously said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Except there’s no evidence that he said or wrote those words. The earliest evidence for this quote comes from a 1981 newspaper article reporting on an Al-Anon … | Continue reading
Can creativity really change the world? Creativity Pioneers argue that it can. By using art, culture, and imagination, these innovators are tackling some of the most pressing social issues of our time. From building recording studios in African prisons to using graphic novels to … | Continue reading
Alongside my work as a member of the faculty of Michigan State University (MSU), I am currently serving a three-year term (2022–2024) as the president of the board of directors of the Educopia Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on supporting communities that develop, sha … | Continue reading
Across the cosmos, only two main pathways exist for making a supernova. Many of the cataclysms that occur in space are typical supernovae: either core-collapse from a massive progenitor star or type Ia from an exploding white dwarf. The most massive stars of all have hundreds of … | Continue reading
Parkinson’s disease is on the rise. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the prevalence of the neurodegenerative disease has doubled worldwide since the turn of the century. This has been linked to a constellation of factors, though the most prominent risks are age a … | Continue reading
This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing above. It’s 2025, and you just rode in a robotaxi for the first time. Getting a … | Continue reading
Is it only your age that makes a person truly Gen-Z? – Rohan, India It’s usually poor philosophy to make any argument on the basis of “when I was growing up,” but I’m sure that when I was growing up, we weren’t so obsessed with generational differences. Of course, we knew about d … | Continue reading
At the start of the 20th century, difficult as it is to believe, we knew almost nothing about the Universe. Sure, we knew about nearby, bright stars, as well as fainter, more distant ones and an ever-growing number of nebulae in the night sky. But all of the stars we knew of were … | Continue reading
Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper. They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, wi … | Continue reading
Three major tribal instincts evolved at different stages of the Stone Age. They helped our forebears learn the ways of their group and act upon them. In more academic terms, they encode group patterns and then enact these patterns. You can think of these systems as as both a rada … | Continue reading
Here’s a new theory of mine: the VC-funded mantra of “move fast and break things” is over. In its place, investors and operators are employing a new strategy — one built around prioritizing durability over speed of growth. This week, I wrote about this idea in a new column for Bi … | Continue reading
Many of us, when we think about scientists, think of them as followers, rather than as trailblazers. Nearly all of them simply gobble up the prevailing wisdom of the day, falling into line by following accepted lines of thinking with barely any imagination at all. Then, in an epi … | Continue reading
In the realm of human evolution, few theories have captured the public imagination quite like the “Stoned Ape Hypothesis.” Originally proposed by ethnobotanist Terence McKenna in his 1992 book Food of the Gods, this provocative idea has recently resurged in popular discourse, tha … | Continue reading
Daniel Dennett spent his career as a philosopher studying the mind, but by his own admission, he was always more of an engineer at heart. His intellectual drive was an ever-present enthusiasm for explaining how things worked and why they happen as they do. Like a boy tinkering wi … | Continue reading
Although most of us are fascinated with astrophysics — the science of what naturally forms all throughout the entirety of the cosmos — very few of us actually embark down the path of becoming an astrophysicist. To get there, one must not only master a large suite of mathematical … | Continue reading
“Is she your mother or your sister?” A seemingly innocent question, perhaps even a flattering one under the right circumstances. Such circumstances, though, would not be found in Auschwitz. Josef Mengele asked Edith Eva Eger this question when she first arrived at the concentrati … | Continue reading
Global sales of electric vehicles (EVs) are racing ahead. Around 14 million passenger EVs were bought worldwide in 2023 – up from 10 million the previous year. To accommodate this surge, cities everywhere are expanding their charging networks. But the development of publicly avai … | Continue reading
Over the last couple of decades, a particular ideology — based around speed of execution — began to insinuate itself into modern business culture. Silicon Valley “disruptors” like Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick enticed a new generation of entrepreneurs and executives with a … | Continue reading
After so many years in the role, a CEO’s sense of self can become deeply entwined with the job so that it is hard for the individual to envision flourishing in life after stepping down. Some CEOs, therefore, resist handing off longer than they should, and boards often fail to pre … | Continue reading
It’s hard to fathom, but it’s barely been two years since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began its science operations in July of 2022. Back then, we had an incredible amount of information about our Universe that we had already uncovered, as well as a great number of cosmi … | Continue reading
Meet the ‘brain coach’ who has found a way to flip negative thoughts and actions and use them for good We’re all assigned a label at some point in our lives. You might be the smart one, the creative one or the lazy one. But is that designation really an accurate and comprehensive … | Continue reading
Dave Stephenson — Chief Business Officer at Airbnb — has made a habit of staying ahead of the curve. After shelving early plans to become an architect, and then training as an engineer, he joined Amazon when it was “this little bookstore in Seattle” before moving to his current e … | Continue reading
Measuring our Universe is challenging from within the Milky Way. The European Space Agency’s space-based Gaia mission has mapped out the three-dimensional positions and locations of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy: the most of all-time. Looking toward the cent … | Continue reading
This article is an installment of Future Explored, Freethink’s weekly guide to world-changing technology. You can get stories like this one straight to your inbox every Saturday morning by subscribing above. It’s 2025, and you just paid $400 to have your entire genome sequenced — … | Continue reading
Mathematics has long been the basis for advances in physics. Albert Einstein hailed general relativity as “a real triumph” for mathematics in 1915, when he discovered that purely mathematical work, more than a half-century old, perfectly described the fabric of spacetime in his t … | Continue reading
A highly contagious bird flu epidemic has spread from continent to continent since 2020. It has killed hundreds of millions of wild birds and caused sporadic outbreaks among poultry. In recent months, the avian influenza strain that causes the disease (H5N1) has jumped to dairy c … | Continue reading
🙂 – Michael, US I’ll let you in on a not-so-surprising secret. If you share your email with the general public, be prepared for some weird things. In case you don’t know, this column works on reader submissions. You can go to this page, type in a question, and I’ll try my … | Continue reading
We belong to a world that is more interconnected, and yet more volatile than ever before. The masses of information that make this connectivity possible present the largest and most pressing threat to humanity, says historian and the best-selling author of Sapiens Yuval Noah Hara … | Continue reading
In 2014, I took a weekend break to York. York is a lovely city in the north of the UK, with an ancient cathedral, quaint cobbled roads, and an interactive Viking experience. It was a great weekend. But when I first got off the train there, I was hungry and disoriented. I’ve never … | Continue reading
For thousands of untold generations, humanity has pondered our cosmic origins with a sense of awe and mystery, as though it were akin to pondering the nature of God. But over the course of the 20th century, a clear picture emerged as supported by an overwhelming suite of scientif … | Continue reading