Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... Continue Reading »
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... Continue Reading »
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... Continue Reading »
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... Continue Reading »
What if space and time aren’t the backdrop of the universe,but rather, are a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges.
This idea would mean that distance, gravity, and the passage of time are consequences of the deep interconnectedness created from the Big Bang.
This video Why modern physics is forcing us to rethink existence is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... Continue Reading »
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ... Continue Reading »
Let me tell you how this works.
A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company’s headcount is 14% higher than a competitor’s, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight.
That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired 18 months ago specifically to “unlock shareholder value,” a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.”
This is the system working exactly as designed.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a founder stands on a stage in a fleece vest and speaks with the cadence of a preacher about “building the future” and “empowering humanity” while unveiling a product whose entire purpose is to make human labor ... Continue Reading »
Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and general relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, these two classes of theories have always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is.
There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. Nor do we understand what dark matter’s nature is, or whether there’s a particle that underlies it. We don’t know whether dark energy is anything other than a cosmological constant, or precisely how cosmic inflation occurred (and with what properties) to set up the conditions for the hot Big Bang. Perhaps even more troublingly, ... Continue Reading »
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ... Continue Reading »
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism.
Saujani founded Girls Who Code in 2011 — an organization that has trained nearly 600,000 young women in computer science — and now runs Moms First, which campaigns for better paid leave and child care provision. Along the way, she’s written several books, including the bestselling Brave, Not Perfect, and her podcast, My So-Called Midlife, aims to answer her daily question: “Is this it?”
In this interview with Big Think, she explores the “generic” culture she says we’ve gotten into, what workers need to be in the age of AI, and why she’s inspired by Bad Bunny.
Big Think: When you were 33, you left your job as a corporate attorney and decided to run for Congress. You were the first Indian-American woman to do so. What was that experience like, and what did you learn from it?
Saujani: I was ... 
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The buildings repeat the same glass, steel, and neutral palettes. Restaurants, retail strips, and conference centers blur together. Everything works. Almost nothing distinguishes one place from another.
These cities are not failing. They are functioning exactly as designed.
Week after week, I see the physical expression of a deeper logic, one that has reshaped not only our cities but our organizations. It is the work of a growing class of professionals I’ve come to think of as the Architects of Banality: leaders, planners, and managers who design systems to perform better and, in the process, make them increasingly indistinguishable.
They do not intend to drain the world of character. They optimize it away.
Once a year, that logic is interrupted when I travel to Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The contrast is immediate. Yogyakarta is inefficient by modern ... 
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great cosmic web, no two objects that we find are ever identical, although many features exhibit clear similarities. Underlying them all, the fundamental laws that they obey — from the quantum to the cosmic — never appear to change. From our cosmic backyard to galaxies found across the Universe:
gravity works the same way,
atoms exhibit the same quantum transitions,
and the fundamental constants all remain unchanged
throughout space and time.
But why is the Universe this way? Is there anything forbidding different regions from having different properties, laws, and constants? Or anything forbidding them from changing over time? That’s this week’s inquiry from our Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Why does nature obey laws? It’s a relatively recent concept because most of what was observable to our ancestors was macroscopic — thunderstorms, earthquakes, volcanoes — and seemed entirely capricious, ... 
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now your native land appears. Closer and closer it comes. You can see the familiar flames of the harvest stubble fires. You recognize the cries of the shore birds and the scent of the pine trees. Finally you can relax. You haven’t slept for a week. You allow yourself to close your eyes … and you awake to a howling storm with no land in sight. You’ve been blown hundreds of miles away.
This, of course, is what happens to Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey. After 10 years of fighting at Troy, Odysseus gets within touching distance of Ithaca, only for his men to open the Aeolian bag and release its unfavorable winds. Thrown disastrously off course, it takes him another 10 years to get back to his wife and son. ... 
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they measured success, and what she would tell anyone starting from the same place.
How the need was identified
Darktrace has seen rapid growth in employee count. With that growth came a pattern that will be familiar to many fast-scaling businesses: talented individual contributors being promoted into management with little to no formal training. “There wasn’t a shared language in what a manager is at Darktrace,” Sarah explained. People were drawing on whatever examples of management they had encountered, which varied enormously.
The signals were coming from multiple directions. Employee engagement survey data showed strong demand for career development and clarity on progression. Requests for training were arriving directly and frequently. When Darktrace’s first Chief People Officer joined in 2022, the case for a structured manager development program was already well-evidenced. Getting buy-in was less ... 
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing.
It happened on a night out. Nick has always been a little bit lairy — a shouty, bargy, aggressive sort of boy. He was great on the rugby pitch, and we would just let him scream or punch a wall whenever he got into a tantrum. But at 19 years old, Nick was outside of a pub having a drink with his friends. Someone shoved past him and knocked his beer everywhere. Nick got angry. Nick always got angry. There was a bit of jostling, a bit of screaming, and Nick threw a punch.
The punch landed on the other man’s chin and threw him back into a shop window’s glass front. The glass shattered, and the shards sliced into this man’s carotid artery. He was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nick was arrested. ... 
Let me tell you how this works.
A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, sees that your company’s headcount is 14% higher than a competitor’s, and writes a note to institutional investors that your stock is overweight.
That note gets circulated and your stock drops. Your board panics. They call the CEO, who was hired 18 months ago specifically to “unlock shareholder value,” a phrase that should be studied by future anthropologists as one of the great euphemisms of our time. An all-hands meeting is called. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.”
This is the system working exactly as designed.
Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, a founder stands on a stage in a fleece vest and speaks with the cadence of a preacher about “building the future” and “empowering humanity” while unveiling a product whose entire purpose is to make human labor ... 
Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum field theories that describe the electromagnetic interaction as well as the strong and weak nuclear forces on one hand, and general relativity describing the effects of gravity on the other hand. Wherever they’ve been challenged, from subatomic up to cosmic scales, these two classes of theories have always emerged victorious. And yet, they simply cannot represent all that there is.
There are many puzzles that hint at this. We cannot explain why there’s more matter than antimatter in the Universe with current physics. Nor do we understand what dark matter’s nature is, or whether there’s a particle that underlies it. We don’t know whether dark energy is anything other than a cosmological constant, or precisely how cosmic inflation occurred (and with what properties) to set up the conditions for the hot Big Bang. Perhaps even more troublingly, ... 
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly desperate. In other words, it was a completely normal networking event.
What struck me was the paradox of it: Every single person in that room wanted to connect, yet nobody was managing to. You’d think that if both people want the same thing, getting there would be the easy part. Clearly, it wasn’t.
After about half an hour, a woman standing nearby turned to me with a completely relaxed smile and said, “These events are always so awkward, aren’t they?”
I felt my shoulders drop immediately. We started talking and couldn’t stop. Other people drifted over. By the end of the night, there was a full circle of people gravitating around her, lighting up as they spoke to her, following her as she moved around the room.
She hadn’t been the most impressive person there, or the funniest, ...