The new book "Lost Cities, Ancient Tombs" documents 100 archaeological discoveries that changed the world.

To enable us to read, the brain piggybacks on other cognitive processes.

The "Foundation" series, recently adapted into a show by Apple TV, was inspired by a fascinating, real-life academic discipline.

The Swedish Academy honored the writer for his uncompromising inquiry into the lasting consequences of Africa’s colonization.

Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series helped inspire the field of social physics, which uses math to understand crowd behavior.

Yukio Mishima treated his life as if it were a story — one with a surprising and deadly final act.

For some people, the emotional pull of fictional characters is profoundly strong.

In his new book "Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave," Ryan Holiday explores the virtue of courage and how to overcome fear.

Everybody wins, everybody loses, or something in between.

The fruits of long-term thinking will reveal themselves in five or ten or 30 years, when you’ve created the future you’ve always wanted.

Journey to the West is rightly considered one of the most influential novels ever written, but the real reason for its success may be its charismatic poster-boy: The Monkey King.

The peasant turned czarist advisor has come to be known and feared as the devil incarnate, but was he really as demonic as we have been led to believe?

Some intellectuals use charisma and deception to obscure the holes in their arguments. Here is how to see through their smokescreen.

Preferring "bases not places," the U.S. does not really resemble the empires of old.

People are driving less. This trend is expected to continue.

Through self-tracking and self-experimentation, we can greatly improve our cognitive capacity.

Why I was prepared to hate The Structure of Scientific Revolutions but ended up loving it.

Instead of just Afghanistan, the U.S. military ought to withdraw from the entire Middle East and much of the rest of the world.

We spend much of our early years learning arithmetic and algebra. What's the use?

For the ancients, hospitality was an inviolable law enforced by gods and priests and anyone else with the power to make you pay dearly for mistreating a stranger.

When we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose; but when we listen to the body, we gain a winning edge.

All the latest titles from the experts at MIT.

A Nazi institute produced a Bible without the Old Testament that portrayed Jesus as an Aryan hero fighting Jewish people.

Can a war be won from the air? A group of renegade pilots in the 1930s thought so.

If computers can beat us at chess, maybe they could beat us at math, too.

In each of our minds, we draw a demarcation line between beliefs that are reasonable and those that are nonsense. Where do you draw your line?

Once a book is published, who gets to interpret it? Us or the author?

Because of our ability to think about thinking, "the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape."

Scans show similar activity to what occurs when you think about yourself.

The key? A computational flattening algorithm.