Carlos comes back from work and it’s late — so late that as he pulls his car into the drive he sees every room in the house is dark. His job is working him to the bone. He feels like he never sees his family anymore. Carlos bought his daughter a toy from her favorite TV show last … | Continue reading
What do snowflakes, glowing street lamps, and Einstein’s “crazy” idea have in common? Physicist Brian Cox unwinds the surprising origins of quantum mechanics—the theory that shattered classical physics and redefined our understanding of reality. From Kepler’s insight in a 17th-ce … | Continue reading
If you’ve spent any time learning the craft of writing, you’ve undoubtedly heard your share of myths, opinions, and prejudices gussied up as hard-and-fast rules. Things like: You should write every day. Only write what you know. Bad grammar is a sign of an unintelligent person. Y … | Continue reading
What really happens to your mind in a crisis? We all think we know how we’d react in an emergency—but according to journalist and author Amanda Ripley, we’re usually wrong. Drawing from interviews with real people in disasters—from plane crashes to terrorist attacks, research on … | Continue reading
One of my favorite childhood movies was Encino Man (1992), where a frozen Neanderthal — played by Brendan Fraser — is thawed out in a suburban L.A. garage. Absurd, yes (and hilarious!) — but sometimes I wonder if we’re the ones being thawed out now, waking up each day to a world … | Continue reading
Humans can be mean, and the world is full of tragedy. These things are almost certainly true, but they’re also fairly vacuous. They’re blunt and demonstrative. Saying something like “humans can fall in love” is not going to win any poetry prizes. The Booker Prize is not awarded t … | Continue reading
A few years ago, in 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming that the chatbot he was working on was sentient. He believed that it could feel things, potentially suffer, and that the moral status of large language models (LLMs) needed to be taken seriously. It tu … | Continue reading
John Amaechi knows what it takes to go from overlooked to unstoppable. The NBA veteran and psychologist reveals the mindset behind his success—how mastering the mundane, handling setbacks, and focusing on small, deliberate actions led him to achieve the extraordinary. Success isn … | Continue reading
Every once in a while, scientists will bite off more than they can chew. Just as we normally use that phrase to mean “taking on a task that’s beyond your means to accomplish with the resources you currently have,” that same limitation applies to a wide variety of scientific probl … | Continue reading
David Perell has a way of making the internet feel small in the best possible sense. A gifted writer and even better connector, he’s built a career not just on publishing great ideas — but on knowing how to share them in a way that actually lands. His work lives at the intersecti … | Continue reading
Starting in the 1980s, one imperial language began to nose ahead of the field, and then to lap the others. English has been, so far, the sole beneficiary of the new era of globalization, the first truly global language. Some have gone so far as to brand it a “killer,” on the grou … | Continue reading
The psychologist David Blustein captured the powerful role of connections at work when he wrote that “each decision, experience, and interaction with the working world is understood, influenced, and shaped by relationships.” As a leader, this means that modeling healthy relations … | Continue reading
When it comes to the galaxies in the Universe, most of us think about the Milky Way and galaxies similar to it. After all, it is our galactic home, containing hundreds of billions of stars and spanning more than 100,000 light-years across. It’s an interesting fact that galaxies c … | Continue reading
A few years ago, I decided to retrain as a neuroscientist. It was a leap into the unknown — no roadmap, just a desire to grow. I chose to approach this time of change with curiosity, and I started a weekly newsletter to document what I learned. Suddenly, my doubts became fuel for … | Continue reading
How do we measure the universe, and are we doing it wrong? Physicist Brian Cox uncovers the hidden assumptions behind our units of measurement, showing how human perspective distorts our understanding of space, time, and scale. Cox explores the fundamental constants—like the spee … | Continue reading
Estimates vary, but it’s safe to say that less than 1% of venture-backed startups become “unicorns” with a valuation of $1 billion or more. However, that figure jumps to nearly 60% for companies included on the annual Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Which is precisely w … | Continue reading
NASA’s mission isn’t merely space exploration; it includes scientific discovery. This “fleet chart” catalogues every NASA science mission across the four main subdivisions — Earth science, heliophysics, planetary science, and astrophysics — that is active as of July 2024. Many mo … | Continue reading
It might seem hard to fathom, but it hasn’t even been ten full years since advanced LIGO, the gravitational wave observatories that brought us our very first successful direct detection, turned on for the very first time. In the time since, it’s been joined by the Virgo and KAGRA … | Continue reading
People sometimes look down on fantasy — not the prize-winning, metaphorical magical realism kind, but the kind of fantasy that has swords, sorcery, and dragons. It is generally accepted that children can enjoy made-up worlds, magical beasts, and dark lords. But, when we become ad … | Continue reading
What does it mean to live ethically in our interconnected world? Author, activist, and philosopher Peter Singer argues that moral progress depends not on tradition or emotion, but on reason—and that each of us has the power to reduce suffering and improve lives through conscious … | Continue reading
Our Universe, as we understood it, underwent a radical change at the end of the 20th century. We had long assumed — consistent with the evidence we had, mind you — that our Universe was taking part in a great cosmic race that began back at the start of the hot Big Bang. On the on … | Continue reading
The English, like the Romans and Russians, once thought they were the descendants of the Trojans. In his Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain), Geoffrey of Monmouth recounts the story of Brutus, son of Iulus (therefore grandson of Aeneas), who was banish … | Continue reading
What if the path out of overwhelm was less about doing more and more about doing less—intentionally? In a world saturated with distractions, decisions, and demands, the CIA’s covert approach to multitasking offers a surprising lesson for the rest of us. Former spy Andrew Bustaman … | Continue reading
Longtime readers of The Nightcrawler may have noticed something shift in me about a year ago. What began as a newsletter on long-term investing in the midst of the pandemic became something else… a deeper search into meaning. A quiet obsession with resilience. A fascination with … | Continue reading
When you wave at yourself in the mirror, your reflection waves back. But biologically, there are many ways it’s painfully obvious that your reflection is fundamentally different from you. When you raise your right hand, your reflection raises its left. If you were to examine your … | Continue reading
We are taught how to see. When a healthy child is born, their eyes go about things with genetic efficiency: blinking and blurry, but functional. A new world of color, shape, and depth overwhelms the eyes that have only ever been closed. These eyes are cameras on the world. They t … | Continue reading
The United States used to be a very different place not so long ago. When a new child was born and was first taken to the doctor, the doctor would talk the parents through a schedule of expected care for the first few months and years of the newborn’s life. That expected care inc … | Continue reading
The flame of passion becomes obvious to those who work closely with passionate people. When employees notice a founders’ passion, they themselves are more enthusiastic and energized at work and have greater clarity about their responsibilities and goals. And this passion pays. Fo … | Continue reading
As a former associate partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers during Silicon Valley’s big shift, I witnessed the VC industry pivot from a proven forty-year playbook of managing risk to something much more aggressive: Get big fast. Don’t worry about profitability. Cash out and … | Continue reading
It was 13.8 billion years ago that our Universe, as we know it, began: at the start of the hot Big Bang. After an initial period of cosmic inflation came to an end, the Universe became filled with particles and antiparticles of all different varieties at incredible temperatures, … | Continue reading
The mountains of northern Laos are beautiful, but tough to negotiate. By car, it can easily take 15 hours to drive the 373 miles (600 km) of winding roads that separate the capital Vientiane from the town of Boten on the Chinese border. Since December 2021, there’s a far straight … | Continue reading
One of the most important management lessons for a founder/CEO is totally unintuitive. My single biggest personal improvement as CEO occurred on the day when I stopped being too positive. As a young CEO, I felt the pressure — the pressure of employees depending on me, the pressur … | Continue reading
Our Universe, today, contains trillions of galaxies with sextillions of stars. Taking us beyond the limits of any prior observatory, including all of the ground-based telescopes on Earth as well as Hubble, NASA’s JWST has shown us the most distant galaxies in the Universe ever di … | Continue reading
Philippa has decided she wants to quit social media. She’s worried about how addictive it is and thinks it’s not doing her any good at all. But then, how will she speak to her aunt in South Africa? What will happen to all of her photos? And how can she organize that party? Trevor … | Continue reading
I’ve been reading the obituaries for as long as I can remember. At first glance, they might seem like little more than a collection of dates and accomplishments. But for me, they’ve become a wellspring of creativity — each one a glimpse into a life I never would’ve imagined. And … | Continue reading
This video A liberal critique of liberalism: What needs to change is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
Ever since the late 1990s, astrophysics has had a big puzzle to reckon with: one that still remains unsolved. When we try to solve Einstein’s field equations for General Relativity as they apply to our actual Universe — our Universe that, on large scales, is both isotropic, or th … | Continue reading
In 2006, journalist AJ Jacobs made a decision that might have cost him his marriage and, quite possibly, sanity: He was going to follow the words of the Bible as literally as possible for an entire year. He would stick to those widely agreed-upon moral commandments that need litt … | Continue reading
This video We have the tools to fix our food system. Why aren’t we using them? is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
This week in my Long Game column for Big Think, I share a personal reflection on a concept that helped me rebuild my life after a major health scare. It’s an idea I believe is becoming more essential than ever across business, investing, and beyond. In the aftermath of brain surg … | Continue reading
In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote one of the most important pieces in the philosophy of art. In The Death of the Author, Barthes argued that the meaning of any text is not defined by the author’s intentions. The reader, and the reader alone, decides what a text means. So, it doesn’t … | Continue reading
On April 17, news burst upon the world — thanks to observations from the James Webb space telescope — that a planet 124 light-years away might contain telltale chemical traces of life. The planet, named K2-18b, appears to house dimethyl sulphide or dimethyl disulphide. These are … | Continue reading
AI is moving at breakneck speed — if you’re not paying attention, you’re already behind, and at risk of extinction. IMB Business School professor Michael Watkins highlights how critical it is to stay afloat in this era of rapid technological evolution, and surf the ever-changing … | Continue reading
Here in the United States in 2025, our society has endured a series of attacks on science, health, and the civil service in our country as never before. Hundreds of thousands of federal employees, after being stripped of their legal protections from political firings, have lost t … | Continue reading
I’m going to tell you how to stay resilient in a world that keeps breaking. But first, I need to tell you about my brain. In 2023, I had surgery to remove part of my cerebellum. That’s the region of the brain responsible for balance, coordination, and thousands of other functions … | Continue reading
What do you get when you combine AI, a stand-up comedian, and a rapper feud? The question reads like the setup to a bad punchline — because in the wrong hands, it absolutely is. (Answer: A diss hack.) But in the right hands, this combination gets you something much better: the vi … | Continue reading
This video Unhappy? Walk towards these 3 beacons, says philosophy is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
Gary Shteyngart was pausing, rubbing his chin been asked but hardly pondering it for the first time. Our question to him: What is the future of the like button? The last time he gave the same topic a lot of thought was in 2007–2008, when he was in the thick of writing a novel cal … | Continue reading