politics
Not just COVID: mortality rates are up from homicides, drug overdoses, accidents
Some of these trends may be due, in part, to the lockdown.
Kafkaesque: How Franz Kafka’s books reveal a real-life dystopia
Unstable politics and virtue signaling are responsible for creating bureaucratic nightmares.
Intolerance of uncertainty drives liberals and conservatives to polarizing partisanship
Political partisanship might be a treatable condition.
7 most notorious and excessive Roman Emperors
These Roman Emperors were infamous for their debauchery and cruelty.
America’s prison catastrophe: Can we undo it?
The US prison system continues to fail, so why does it still exist?
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How the Yazoo Land Scandal changed American history
Without the now-obscure land investment affair, Georgia might have been a "super state."
Why people become radical extremists and how to help them
New research sheds light on the indoctrination process of radical extremist groups.
Math explains polarization, and it’s not just about politics
People often divide the world into "us" and "them" then forget about everybody else.
How important is civility for democracy? For Habermas, not very.
The public sphere should be open to conflict.
Politics desperately needs hope, so why does it no longer inspire it?
For some philosophers, hope is a second-rate way of relating to reality.
Hannah Arendt: Change the world, not yourself
How the German political philosopher called out Henry David Thoreau on civil disobedience.
Bellingcat is transforming investigative journalism with open-sourced information
The independent news collective is teaching a new generation of journalists and citizens to spot the stories in plain sight.
The best defense against authoritarianism? More educated citizens.
For democracy to prosper in the long term, we need more people to reach higher levels of education.
Fight or flight? Why some people flee and others stand their ground
How different people react to threats of violence.
Why science denial and science negation are different
Surprising as it may seem, we are all very good at denial. Negation, however, is a different phenomena.
Has political correctness gone too far?
The debate over whether or not there is a place for political correctness in modern society is not always black and white.
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13 min
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What democracy and science demand: The ‘Smartmatic vs Fox News’ case
The opening lines of Smartmatic's $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News lay bare the culture of denial in the US.
10 pieces of wisdom from Roman emperors
Even tyrants and despots offer wisdom worth heeding.
What are the limits of free speech?
7 scholars and legal experts dissect what you can and can't say in America.
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22 min
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What early US presidents looked like, according to AI-generated images
"Deepfakes" and "cheap fakes" are becoming strikingly convincing — even ones generated on freely available apps.
When worldviews collide: Why science needs to be taught differently
Science doesn't exist in a cultural and existential vacuum and its teaching shouldn't either.
13.8: Why we’re here
Welcome to the 13.8 relaunch, a new Big Think column led by physicists and friends Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser.
Why do ‘Kevins’ vote for far-right parties?
In Germany and France, having an Anglo-Saxon first name is a good predictor of extreme voting behavior.
Does fact-checking really work? Timing matters.
New research from MIT is unintuitive but could lead to a better system.
Twitter turns to the hive mind for moderation via its Birdwatch program
The platform experiments with letting users decide what content needs flagging.
Biden nominates Dr. Eric Lander as cabinet-level science adviser, in U.S. first
Dr. Eric Lander is a pioneer in genomics. What role will he play in the new administration?
This is your brain on political arguments
Debating is cognitively taxing but also important for the health of a democracy—provided it's face-to-face.
Should law enforcement be using AI and cell phone data to find rioters?
The attack on the Capitol forces us to confront an existential question about privacy.
Survey shows Congress is more religious than America
A new survey shows who believes what and how it differs from what Americans believe as a whole.
In 1988, Bernie Sanders outlined the key problem with news media today
"The function of private media is to make money for the people who own the media. It is a business," Sanders said.