Full Interview

Rachel Yehuda, a leading PTSD researcher, has spent her career uncovering the way that trauma can leave impressions on our genes, sometimes passing biological echoes of those events to the next generation.

Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results

NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges. 

Historian Eric Cline argues the Bronze Age collapse wasn't the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.

Sam Kean examines how rogue archaeologists are recreating the sounds, tastes, smells, and practices of the ancient past.

Alain de Botton argues that our romantic lives are shaped more by the emotional patterns we learned in childhood than by destiny.

Chris Miller explains the hidden reason that global superpowers are obsessed with Taiwan.

Astronomer Jill Tarter explains why SETI is really about technology, patience, and learning how to tell alien signals from our own.

“Our conscious awareness is everything. And the fact that it's still so mysterious to scientists and to all of humanity, the fact that it's still one of the great unsolved mysteries makes it something that everyone can be excited about and that inspires awe in everyone.”

Why social media is the perfect recipe for kids to become addicted to their smartphones.

"The process of systematizing, correcting errors, finding approximations, and making them work as civil systems that was what really drove me to start looking at human calculation and what was the foundation that it laid for the modern computer age."

"This will help people take meaningful steps to slow the rate of aging and increase what we call their health span or their kind of time of life expectancy free from disease."

Stoicism has been flattened into slogans about toughness, detachment, and emotional silence, a version that’s easy to sell, but mostly wrong.  Massimo Pigliucci returns Stoicism to its original purpose: a […]

“How can all the diversity and, sort of, seeming order that's out there in the world emerge from a process dependent upon chance?”

“The problem is in our information. Humans, yes, we are generally good and wise, but if you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions.”

“Old systems of the past are collapsing, and new systems of the future are still to be born. I call this moment the great progression.”

“Why would adding shame and blame help me improve my behavior?”

“Psychedelics crosscut so many interesting domains. They've been used for time immemorial by indigenous cultures. In our own Western cultural history, they really exploded on the scene in the 1960s, and were associated with radical changes to society.”

“What's really interesting about neural networks is the way that they think or the way that they operate is a lot like human intuition”

Instead of treating belief as a private preference, philosopher Alex O’Connor examines how our moral positions shape institutions, obligations, and the ways we justify our choices.