Are you starting an initiative or reevaluating an older project with fresh eyes? Are you starting a new job and looking to impress your team? Or maybe, though hopefully not, you’re in the middle of a crisis you must resolve? Whether you need to make the most of an opportunity or … | Continue reading
For the last decade, Seth Godin has shaped how millions — myself included — think about work, creativity, business, and life itself. He’s written 24 bestselling books, including Linchpin and Purple Cow. His blog has over 10,000 posts and counting. Godin believes most people fool … | Continue reading
“A colleague of mine advised me to apply to ten jobs a day, but I’ve been focused on doing more and getting to twenty,” my client Todd said. He then scrolled through his spreadsheet of all the jobs he had applied for — hundreds of applications, with no interviews. What at first w … | Continue reading
Bring up the concept of the Multiverse, and you’re likely to get a variety of responses. Some will look to it as an idea full of hope: the hope that there’s a version of you out there that made a bolder choice, had a better outcome, or avoided a critical blunder at some point alo … | Continue reading
Maddie hated the moment when she came home from school and woke her computer. There was a time when she had loved the bulky old laptop whose keys had been worn down over the years until what was left of the lettering appeared like glyphs, a hand-me-down from her father that she h … | Continue reading
“Criminally underrated.” “One of the best animated series I ever watched.” “Legitimately one of the best sci-fi shows of the past decade.” These are some of the comments you’ll run into when you search reviews for Pantheon, an animated series about a world in which shadowy tech f … | Continue reading
The living room. I sat down on the couch, hands waving as I explained my PhD funding dilemma to my parents. “So that’s where I’m at,” I concluded, gesturing with my glass. “I’m trying to decide whether to transfer programs or walk away entirely.” My mother tilted her head slightl … | Continue reading
Earlier in his career, when John Donovan [the former CEO of AT&T Communications] was a partner at a big consulting firm, his CEO at the time introduced a new incentive system for how people would divide commissions based on their specific contributions to landing new business. Th … | Continue reading
One tremendous question puzzling astronomers is, “how did the Universe grow up?” At the start of the hot Big Bang, the Universe was rapidly expanding and filled with high-energy, very densely packed, ultra-relativistic quanta. An early stage of radiation domination gave way to se … | Continue reading
No person is one thing. The kindest person you know has a tiny recess of cruelty in them. The happiest person you have ever met will have their depressive moments. The gentlest person you can think of can be filled with rage by one particular thing. There is no purity of any kind … | Continue reading
“Do we want to understand whether we are alone in the universe, whether there is other life out there? That is one fundamental question that drives many astronomers.” This video Searching for aliens and Earth 2.0 | David Kipping: Full Interview is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
In all the Universe, with all we’ve learned about the underlying properties of reality, perhaps nothing mystifies our intuition more than the notion that reality is fundamentally quantum in nature. It isn’t puzzling so much for the fact that matter and energy can be broken down i … | Continue reading
Imagine lounging in a hammock on a sunny beach, palm trees swaying in the breeze, the bright turquoise of the sea barely dimmed by your sunglasses. You glance up and down the beach: not a soul in sight. It’s the first day of your holiday, and your whole body feels so relaxed; you … | Continue reading
Have you ever seen a lek? Matt Ridley has. In fact, the prolific science writer somewhat bashfully admits to having viewed “umpteenth” leks in his lifetime. After googling “lek” to make sure it’s not … what you think it is, you may be tempted to watch a video of one. If you do, y … | Continue reading
Do we have proof of a multiverse? Our idea of the multiverse stems from the notion of quantum mechanics: The idea that every time we enter a situation there are potentially infinite possibilities to arise as the outcome. But when we make a decision, we only get one of these outco … | Continue reading
Three months ago, wildfires tore through Los Angeles. Entire neighborhoods were reduced to ash. The process of rebuilding has just begun. It made me think about how we rebuild — and what lessons we carry forward. On a recent trip to London, I spoke with the historian Dr. Simon Th … | Continue reading
Inside the Sun, the most powerful source of energy for several light-years in all directions, an incredible process occurs. Deep within its core, hundreds of thousands of kilometers beneath the edge of its photosphere, temperatures exceed a critical threshold of four million degr … | Continue reading
In 2023, the British philosopher Julian Baggini introduced the idea of “cluster thinking,” which is where we “assume that certain beliefs form a natural set when, in reality, they are independent of each other.” For example, test these out: Kadie is a gay rights activist. She att … | Continue reading
Who is Peter Leyden, and why would you subscribe to read the essays in his new series, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050? That’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask about any writer on Substack, columnist for Freethink Media (the company syndicating these essays), or book au … | Continue reading
There’s an extremely powerful idea in science that we take for granted, but apply all the time. The idea is simply this: that if we know the laws and rules governing a physical system, and we also know what the initial conditions of that system are, then we can apply the known ru … | Continue reading
In our data-driven age, everything seems designed to hand us solutions. Every day, Google processes a staggering 13.7 billion searches — nearly 5 trillion a year. Amid the growing sea of AI chatbots, ChatGPT alone handles more than a billion inquiries daily. Surrounded by this av … | Continue reading
Manipulative is the most counterintuitive trait because nearly everyone trusts relationships, even their most important ones — spouse, kids, parents, business partner — to sort themselves out without conscious effort. Over and over, we take our relationships for granted. Then we … | Continue reading
Sexual selection may explain the start of art. As [Charles] Darwin put it in The Descent of Man: “The playing passages of bower-birds are tastefully ornamented with gaily-coloured objects; and this shews that they must receive some kind of pleasure from the sight of such things.” … | Continue reading
In 2018, Reid Hoffman received a panicky call from Sam Altman. Things were not going well inside OpenAI. “We knew what we wanted to do,” Altman said. “We knew why we wanted to do it. But we had no idea how.” Its people tried applying AI to video games, as DeepMind had already don … | Continue reading
Over the past 35 years, a tremendous transformation has occurred in astronomy. Back in 1990, there wasn’t a single planet known outside of our own Solar System. Exoplanets had been claimed previously, but all were found to be mere mirages: artifacts of false signals hiding in ins … | Continue reading
Anyone marginally familiar with psychedelics has heard of magic mushrooms, LSD, or even MDMA. But ibogaine, the psychoactive compound in the Central African shrub Tabernanthe iboga, may not be on many people’s radars. Researchers are beginning to test its efficacy in treating men … | Continue reading
High-performing teams don’t fail overnight. Often, their decline stems from common leadership behaviors that quietly erode trust, innovation, and productivity. Even seasoned executives who deeply care about their people can unknowingly sabotage team performance through these blin … | Continue reading
Before any stars formed in the Universe, there was no oxygen. This plot shows the abundance of the light elements over time, as the Universe expands and cools during the various phases of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. By the time the first stars form, the initial ratios of hydrogen, … | Continue reading
At the end of his life, Herman Melville (author of Moby-Dick) wrote a book called The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. The novel is set aboard a steamboat and is a collection of vignettes involving conmen, cheats, and chumps. In Melville’s world, people are divided into three kind … | Continue reading
This video Anne-Laure Le Cunff: The 3 cognitive scripts that rule over your life | Full Interview is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
Although Einstein is a legendary figure in science for a large number of reasons — E = mc², the photoelectric effect, and the notion that the speed of light is a constant for everyone — his most enduring discovery is also the least understood: his theory of gravitation, General R … | Continue reading
For centuries, we’ve generally defined intelligence as the ability to solve problems quickly. But is that definition too narrow? What if intelligence isn’t just about thinking fast, but about how well something, whether a person, a plant, or even a planet, connects, adapts, and t … | Continue reading
If you’re lucky enough to live in a place with decent air quality, the surrounding medium might seem like empty space — a nothingness that deserves little attention beyond how hot or cold it feels. Carl Zimmer might change your mind about that. In his new book, Air-Borne, the cel … | Continue reading
Consciousness is everything we know, everything we experience. The mystery at the heart of consciousness lies in why our universe – despite teeming with non-conscious matter – is configured in a way where it’s having a felt experience from the inside. Modern neuroscience suggests … | Continue reading
As a father of two young kids, I constantly think about how to provide my girls with the best possible education. We live in a period of unprecedented change. AI is going to profoundly alter the global economy — so it’s only logical that our education system should (and will) ada … | Continue reading
Whenever we perform science at the frontiers — probing the Universe, at some level, in ways, with instruments, or at precisions that we’ve never achieved in all our prior interrogations of it — there’s an incredible puzzle that arises. On the one hand, we design and build our too … | Continue reading
You are living through an extraordinary moment in history. The year 2025 stands a good chance of being seen by those in the future as the exact juncture between two very different historical eras. We are finally seeing the end of the long 20th century and starting to see the new … | Continue reading
Albert L. Gordon was a homophobe. This being the early 1960s, he wasn’t alone. Gordon and his college buddies thought homosexuality was abhorrent, unnatural, and almost certainly a marker of other criminality. One day in 1962, Gordon got a phone call from the police. His son had … | Continue reading
Her offbeat humor and animated delivery have helped Atsuko Okatsuka carve a space for herself in the comedy world. But her success sprouted from a lifelong search for belonging. For most of her life, she didn’t feel like she was good enough. “I think I’m kind of finding that I’m … | Continue reading
There are two important and common words that, when used scientifically, have a very different meaning than how we use them in everyday language: theory and consensus. These two words, in our commonplace usage, have meanings that imply a large degree of uncertainty, and enormous … | Continue reading
The fires came fast. First, a flicker on the horizon — distant, almost unreal. Then, within hours, a wall of flame, devouring everything in its path. By the time the January 2025 wildfires finally burned out, Los Angeles was a city in mourning. Entire neighborhoods had been erase … | Continue reading
Before starting kindergarten, most children are already asking where babies come from. The question comes naturally to children, courtesy of their innate curiosity about the world and themselves. As such, is it any wonder that humanity has collectively wondered about the origins … | Continue reading
In the age of AI, there is a new imperative to focus on the mind of the leader. Why? We need this focus because our mind is not naturally equipped to handle today’s relentless onslaught of information and the accompanying demands for our attention. The exponential growth in techn … | Continue reading
When most people think about astronomy, they think about the common, light-emitting objects familiar in our night sky: stars, planets, and perhaps even galaxies. Once in a while, here on Earth, we’ll encounter a few other objects that — like planets — reflect the Sun’s light to a … | Continue reading
Investor Guy Spier is a self-described “disciple” of multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and one of the world’s most famous money-makers. That places him among hundreds of thousands of Buffett acolytes — nothing so unusual there — but he’s one of the few t … | Continue reading
All throughout the Universe, spiral galaxies are extremely common. Spirals, initially recorded as faint, fuzzy objects with no discernible structure through more primitive telescopes, were clearly observed since the mid-1800s to be prevalent in the night sky. We now understand th … | Continue reading
Sure, it’s easy to look out at the Universe and take stock of what we find. Although spiral and elliptical galaxies house the majority of the Universe’s stars, represented locally by galaxies like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, the overwhelming majority of galaxies are much sma … | Continue reading
We need creative solutions to society’s problems. What we don’t need is the anxiety that accompanies not having those solutions. Uncertainty about the future makes humans edgy enough. So, what can we do to better understand, accept, and manage such anxiety? Martha Beck, a Harvard … | Continue reading