Don’t settle for comfortable and familiar thoughts, reach for what you don’t know, says Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt.

What makes a great book… well… great? Author Salman Rushdie gives us his idea on what separates the classics from the rest of the class.

Is there life on other planets? Harvard biologist Jonathan B. Losos has an interesting theory that since there are so many Earth-type planets in our galaxy alone that there’s a good chance that there’s some humanoid looking (at least in the bipedal sense) creatures out there, too. Just like a Hollywood movie.

Will A.I. take us over, and one day look back on this time period as the dawn of their civilization? Richard Dawkins posits an interesting idea, or at the very least a premise to a good science-fiction novel.

Why do first-world ailments get cured faster than global health crises? Because Big Pharma doesn’t serve sick people, it serves rich people—let’s change that.

Rabbi Darren Levine explains how the psychology of happiness intersects with religious practice.

We are on the verge of the ‘Total Work’ dystopia, a prediction first made in 1948. Can Universal Basic Income wake us from our stupor?

When it comes to climate change, gun control, and vaccinations, facts don’t change people’s minds—but there is one technique that might.

The NASA probe to Saturn went out in a blaze of glory last week.

The Mayor of Atlanta explains that if your version of America involves keeping “others” out, then you have yet to learn the lessons of the past.

When we create something more intelligent than we could ever be, what happens after that? We have to teach it.

Since Russia (most likely) hacked our Presidential election in 2016, there’s been talk of using cell phones for voting. Think again.

Some anxieties are essential, and for millennia they kept our ancestors alive. But there’s another type of anxiety that we can actually do away with—and it’s defeated via hope.

The #1 problem with America’s mission to spread democracy? We don’t know how to do it.

Why does America confuse fantasy for reality, in pop culture and in politics? Kurt Andersen can pinpoint the moment it happened.

Infants can learn a lot about the world—if adults know the right ways to encourage them.

We’ve heard it before: Artificial Intelligence is coming to take our jobs. But is it really their fault, or the company that can’t figure out how to create new ones?

More modern cars are easier to hack. So are pacemakers and other medical devices. What does that mean for the future?

All science begins with a leap of intuition, says Richard Dawkins, but we can only ever find objective truths by knowing when to let evidence take over from emotion.

Pregnancy is proving to be a crucial time to study the effects of hope and optimism within a relationship.

Your mind doesn’t run parallel tasks, it has to trade off one focus for another. The good news is that mindfulness meditation can hone your attention span, and reduce stress and anxiety.

Salman doesn’t know why we can’t all just get along. If both sides just talked to each other and were less emotional and more pragmatic in their arguments, we might have a better chance of coexisting.

We hear the term “disrupted” a lot. But what does it mean, and why does the fear of change it represents perfectly describe how President Trump won in 2016?

How do you spot terrorism before it happens? Look for patterns in what might seem like unlikely places. Like the living wage of a border guard.

Do animals feel pain? Well, yes. Obviously. They may even feel pain a lot stronger than humans do.

The most revelatory answers in life come from complex, diverse populations. Technology can open our eyes to what we’re missing and destroy our subconscious biases in one fell swoop.

The Actors’ Gang Prison Project has spent ten years proving that teaching prisoners self-worth and emotional intelligence pays off.

There’s only one guy on this whole planet who’s done both. He tells us what it’s like to experience two of the most extreme feats.

The Internet is all shadows and mirrors—but what if it were the central source of truth? Thanks to Blockchain technology, it’s a future that’s possible.

AI might be coming for many of the jobs in the future. But not this kind, and not ever. Here’s why.