From science to philosophy, three perspectives explore why humans can’t stop asking “why.” Our search for purpose, they suggest, is less about finding answers and more about learning how to move forward.

Leaders in China hope that AI and robotics can finally resolve the flaws of a centralized planned economy. But US technoculture has an edge.

In this excerpt from The Breath of the Gods, Simon Winchester explores how the Sumerians first named the wind and shaped our early understanding of the natural world.

Weird-looking galaxies, with tentacle-like tails or prominent dual streams, appear like jellyfish or bunny ears. But that’s just the start.

When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.

In a world of fast answers, leadership shaped by suffering is radical — and transformative.

Digital tools are pulling us away from fixed texts and back toward fluid, interactive communication.

“People got skeptical, fearful, doubtful of the very idea of progress in the 20th century and we allowed that to slow down progress itself.”

"Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end."

In this excerpt from "The First Eight," Congressman Jim Clyburn shares the story of Robert Smalls, the man whose audience with Lincoln may have saved the Union army.

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

In 2017, a kilonova sent light and gravitational waves across the Universe. Here on Earth, there was a 1.7 second signal arrival delay. Why?

Ryan Holiday on why wisdom depends on failure, experimentation, and the courage to admit when we’re wrong.

NASA’s Caleb Scharf talks with Big Think about life’s long experiment in expansion.

The brain is an “illusion factory.” Here’s what that means for our perception of time.

“Chance invents and natural selection propagates that chance invention.”

Former tech founder Scott Britton wants to shatter the binary myth that separates driving ambition from inner development.

The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.

Do aliens speak the same physics that we do, with similar laws, observables, and underlying mathematics. Maybe not, argues Daniel Whiteson.

“Consciousness is fundamental. It's a fundamental property of the world that we inhabit, a fundamental property of the universe.”