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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
The movie gestures at one of humanity's biggest questions yet chooses to look away, writes Big Think producer Clark Frankel.
For all we know, the cosmos could truly be infinite in scale. But the observable part of our Universe? It's finite, and its size is known.
A writer’s search for an affordable home leads to the desert — and a community building a different kind of American dream.
I’ve lived in a converted van for six years. The freedom is real — but so are the trade-offs people rarely talk about.
From Amish Country to Slab City, these are the places where Americans reject the mainstream.
The ambiguity of Bartleby shows that opting out can be a form of resistance, retreat, or something harder to judge.
A conversation with Richard Haass about reorienting the U.S. toward long-term thinking and reinstating global stability into the 22nd century.
A conversation with the Hardcore History host on executive power, political independents, and how America drifted into partisan dysfunction.
From Gilded Age space dreams to AI’s cosmic endgame, fiction reveals how the drive to shed obligations to others can escalate.
With the U.S. stepping away from international organizations en masse, the groups are being forced to find a new balance.
Philosopher Gert Biesta on the real reason we should be wary of AI in education.
The printing press gave us objective truth. Social media made truth tribal again. AI could make it something else entirely.
We used to think the Big Bang started it all. Then we realized that something else came before it, erasing everything that existed prior.
Miramax's explosive success with Pulp Fiction ignited an indie boom, rewrote Oscar campaigns, and blurred the line between independent cinema and the Hollywood mainstream.
Jamir Nazir says “The Serpent in the Grove” came from a childhood memory. The internet said it came from a machine.
65 million years ago, a massive asteroid struck Earth, causing a mass extinction. Without advance warning, could anyone have spotted it?
1hr 18mins
In conversation with Kmele Foster, Dan Carlin unpacks the myth of shared reality, the erosion of society, and the history that preceded it.
A tombstone reveals the life story of a man who endured the brutal reality of Roman war and slavery.
Economists examining half a million ancient coins trace the end of Rome — and the rise of northern Europe — to the 7th century.
Our left-vs.-right conception of politics was born in revolutionary France. The maps that followed were more sophisticated, but each carries a bias of its own.