Before Herbert came along and wrote Dune, few if any sci-fi stories were set in fully realized universes.

Frank Herbert's "Dune" refers to a religious desert people who are desperate for a savior to overthrow an evil empire. Sound familiar?

In his new book, "Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy," former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang explores how media narratives can warp public perception of political candidates.

The most unpleasant aspect of intellectual liberalism is that when speech causes emotional or mental pain, the offended parties are morally entitled to nothing.

Will and Ariel Durant were praised for their ability to look at the big picture without losing sight of its little details, even if they did miss some of them.

Dave Eggers book, "The Circle," uses satire to illuminate how privacy is fast becoming a lost virtue in the digital age.

William Shatner is going to space because Jeff Bezos loves Star Trek.

Societal breakdown, whether real or imagined, can lead to dramatic responses — like blood-sucking vampires.

Our minds are hyper-taxed due to hyper-tasking. We need to slow down and allow ourselves to daydream if we want to improve our attention.

The book Buddha Takes the Mound delivers an engaging and sophisticated account of Buddhism’s worldview through the prism of baseball.

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.