[In the] summer of 2008, Sue and I kept up the charade of normal life by hunting for a house. We told ourselves it was optimism. In reality, it was desperation disguised as hope; some fragile belief that this whole FBI informant nightmare had an expiration date.
Sue’s dad, Bob, tipped us off about a new build in Westwood. We drove out one humid afternoon, stepped inside, and immediately saw a future we weren’t sure we deserved: four bedrooms, three and a half baths, wide hall-ways that echoed with the promise of kids’ laughter. A quiet street. Neighbors who waved. A front porch that begged for summer nights and cold drinks. We fell hard for the illusion. And like two people pretending they weren’t standing on a fault line, we made an offer.
The down payment came from our savings and what was left from my last-minute sale of Lehman stock back in May. By Friday, September 12, those same shares were already staggering at $3.65. All weekend we watched the headlines darken: CEOs locked in at the New York Fed on ... Continue Reading »
Here on Earth, the very idea of a laser is relatively novel, having only been invented in 1958. The underlying physics is straightforward:
an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state,
the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state,
where it emits light of a very specific wavelength in the process.
Then, pumped or injected energy re-excites an electron within that very same molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over. This causes light of precisely that same, monochromatic wavelength to get emitted over and over again. So long as you continue stimulating the same transition, you’ll keep getting light of that exact same frequency over and over again, every time.
But out there in the Universe, this exact phenomenon occurs naturally in a number of galaxies at much longer wavelengths than the eye can see: in the microwave portion of the spectrum. Astrophysically, these objects are known as masers, and arise when energy gets injected into large populations of molecules that are only allowed to de-excite in specific ways. Using the MeerKAT array, scientists in 2022 identified the strongest, ... Continue Reading »
European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a white horse. In the Norse tale “Tatterhood,” a red flower and a white flower grow side by side in the dark earth.
This week, I interviewed the mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw for Mini Philosophy. Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild, makes the case that folk stories and myths can help us understand ourselves and life more broadly. And in these colors, we find a map of human maturation.
The colors correspond roughly to three modes of being. Each has a gift and a shadow. Each belongs most naturally to a particular season of life, though we can move in and out of all three depending on what’s happening to us. And most of us, Shaw argues, are deficient in one of them without knowing it.
The Red
The Red ... Continue Reading »
A woman stands at the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. Behind her, an explosion of life — thousands of animal species, billions of trees, lush canopy. Ahead, another kind: Humanity.
People from every corner of the Earth fill the city of Belém, Brazil. It’s a sea of color, music, and emotion as they dance and stomp across asphalt, past highrises in the hot, humid air. A paper snake the length of a city block ripples overhead.
The woman wipes sweat from her temples. Her purple baseball cap is soaked through, its message blunt:
DERECHOS A LA TIERRA ¡YA!
Land rights — now.
Photo by Natalia Ramírez Gutiérrez
The woman is Joan Carling, a human rights activist and the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI). The scene unfolded at COP30, the climate summit hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2025. A member of the Kankanaey people of the Philippines, Carling was one of at least 5,000 Indigenous representatives in attendance, a more than tenfold increase over recent COPs.
Their message to international climate-action decision makers is simple: Indigenous Peoples ... Continue Reading »
It’s called the Gladiator Strategy.
The Swiss CEO of a shoe company stirred his espresso as he tried to convince me of his preferred way of working: “I think a battle of ideas is so important. It helps us fight things out, so the one idea left standing is the absolute best idea.”
In Roman times, the best gladiators weren’t necessarily the best athletes or the strongest physical performers but the ones who knew how to entertain the crowds in the way the emperor loved. Whatever, whoever amused the emperor was given the thumbs-up. The workplace parallel is perhaps obvious: People can “win” internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So “fighting for the best idea” becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor’s — er, boss’s — opinions.
I asked, “You believe that putting people and their ideas under extreme pressure will yield diamonds?”
“Yes!” he answered enthusiastically, as if I was finally understanding him.
Some coffee spilled.
I really didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I also knew that his beloved ... Continue Reading »
Sometimes, when Jim Belushi feels anxious, he tells himself he’s actually just stoked. “Physiologically,” the actor, comedian, and entrepreneur tells Big Think, “what happens to your body when you’re nervous or fearful is exactly the same thing as what happens when you’re excited,” so all you need to do is flip a switch. It’s one of several tricks he learned early in life that stuck with him throughout the various chapters of his long and storied career, from Hollywood to Oregon pot farm.
Born to Albanian-American parents in the suburbs of Chicago, Belushi began acting in high school — an experience, he once told the Connecticut Post, that “made me feel good for the first time in my life.” Following in the footsteps of elder sibling John Belushi, he cut his teeth at Chicago’s renowned Second City improv troupe before joining the cast of Saturday Night Live while the program was in the middle of its golden age.
After John tragically passed away from a drug overdose at age 33, Jim honored the Belushi legacy by joining the TV-movie-music phenomenon, The Blues ... Continue Reading »
Here on Earth, it seems easy and straightforward to know “where” anything is, or to know “when” an event either occurred or will occur. After all, we’ve mapped out the entire surface of the Earth, and can define our location with three coordinates — latitude, longitude, and altitude/depth — no matter where in the world we are. Additionally, we’ve synchronized all methods of timekeeping here on Earth with atomic clocks, enabling people from all different locations on Earth to know both the “when” and “where” any event occurs, will occur, or has occurred.
But this relies on an underlying assumption that most of us make without ever thinking twice about it: that you, from your location on Earth, are observing the same “here and now” as anyone else in any other location on Earth. Unfortunately, those ideas were proven to be incorrect more than a hundred years ago. We now recognize that even ideas like “when” and “where” are subject to the laws of Einstein’s relativity, and that in relativity, space and time are not absolute quantities, but rather are relative ... Continue Reading »
I read Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet when I was 14 years old, and it scared the life out of me. Lynas takes the reader on a journey of what to expect from a world that’s one degree warmer, two degrees, three degrees, all the way up to six degrees. By the middle of the book, your blood pressure is high; by the end, you’re on the floor.
It is a well-researched book that offers us a window into many possible futures. Fortunately, the scientific consensus has moved away from the most extreme scenarios since its publication. Unfortunately, a lot of the public messaging has not. Many people believe a pathway to 5°C or 6°C is already locked in, and the only thing we can do now is prepare for the worst.
Let’s look at what the latest science says about where we might end up by 2100.
If no countries stepped up their climate efforts, simply preserving what they already put in place, we might end up at 2.5°C to 3°C higher than preindustrial temperatures by the end ... Continue Reading »
On a rough day, it’s rarely the workload that breaks you. It’s the human layer: the meeting that turns tense, the work chat message you read as disrespect, the impulse to fire off a reply that feels righteous for thirty seconds and costly for a week. In those moments, emotional intelligence is basically the difference between staying aligned and creating unforced errors.
You may not control the situation, but you can control how you meet it. You can stay aligned, or drift into unforced errors: reactive words, sloppy decisions, needless conflict.
Confucius even gives a compact checklist for this: nine “states of mind” to return to in the middle of ordinary life. In the Analects he writes:
The superior person has nine states of mind:
for eyes: bright
for ears: penetrating
for countenance: cordial
for demeanor: humble
for words: trustworthy
for service: reverent
for doubt: questioning
for anger: circumspect
for facing a chance to profit: moral
Here “superior person” does not mean a status flex. It means the mature person, the person training character. These aren’t abstract virtues floating above ordinary life. They’re trainable capacities, ways of seeing, listening, speaking, and acting that ... Continue Reading »
For most of human history, love was not a choice we made, love was a choice made for us. By our family, our class, or by means of survival.
Now that love has been liberated, it seems to have become more complicated and more illusive than ever. Alain de Botton explains.
This video Why relationships in 2026 carry impossible expectations is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
[In the] summer of 2008, Sue and I kept up the charade of normal life by hunting for a house. We told ourselves it was optimism. In reality, it was desperation disguised as hope; some fragile belief that this whole FBI informant nightmare had an expiration date.
Sue’s dad, Bob, tipped us off about a new build in Westwood. We drove out one humid afternoon, stepped inside, and immediately saw a future we weren’t sure we deserved: four bedrooms, three and a half baths, wide hall-ways that echoed with the promise of kids’ laughter. A quiet street. Neighbors who waved. A front porch that begged for summer nights and cold drinks. We fell hard for the illusion. And like two people pretending they weren’t standing on a fault line, we made an offer.
The down payment came from our savings and what was left from my last-minute sale of Lehman stock back in May. By Friday, September 12, those same shares were already staggering at $3.65. All weekend we watched the headlines darken: CEOs locked in at the New York Fed on ... 
Here on Earth, the very idea of a laser is relatively novel, having only been invented in 1958. The underlying physics is straightforward:
an electron within a molecule gets excited to a higher-energy state,
the electron de-transitions back to the lower energy state,
where it emits light of a very specific wavelength in the process.
Then, pumped or injected energy re-excites an electron within that very same molecule back into that higher-energy state, over and over. This causes light of precisely that same, monochromatic wavelength to get emitted over and over again. So long as you continue stimulating the same transition, you’ll keep getting light of that exact same frequency over and over again, every time.
But out there in the Universe, this exact phenomenon occurs naturally in a number of galaxies at much longer wavelengths than the eye can see: in the microwave portion of the spectrum. Astrophysically, these objects are known as masers, and arise when energy gets injected into large populations of molecules that are only allowed to de-excite in specific ways. Using the MeerKAT array, scientists in 2022 identified the strongest, ... 
European folktales often center around three colors: red, black, and white. Snow White has skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. In the Grimms’ “Iron Hans,” a young man rides three horses into three battles — a red horse, a black horse, and a white horse. In the Norse tale “Tatterhood,” a red flower and a white flower grow side by side in the dark earth.
This week, I interviewed the mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw for Mini Philosophy. Shaw’s new book, Liturgies of the Wild, makes the case that folk stories and myths can help us understand ourselves and life more broadly. And in these colors, we find a map of human maturation.
The colors correspond roughly to three modes of being. Each has a gift and a shadow. Each belongs most naturally to a particular season of life, though we can move in and out of all three depending on what’s happening to us. And most of us, Shaw argues, are deficient in one of them without knowing it.
The Red
The Red ... 
A woman stands at the edge of the Amazon Rainforest. Behind her, an explosion of life — thousands of animal species, billions of trees, lush canopy. Ahead, another kind: Humanity.
People from every corner of the Earth fill the city of Belém, Brazil. It’s a sea of color, music, and emotion as they dance and stomp across asphalt, past highrises in the hot, humid air. A paper snake the length of a city block ripples overhead.
The woman wipes sweat from her temples. Her purple baseball cap is soaked through, its message blunt:
DERECHOS A LA TIERRA ¡YA!
Land rights — now.
Photo by Natalia Ramírez Gutiérrez
The woman is Joan Carling, a human rights activist and the executive director of Indigenous Peoples Rights International (IPRI). The scene unfolded at COP30, the climate summit hosted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in November 2025. A member of the Kankanaey people of the Philippines, Carling was one of at least 5,000 Indigenous representatives in attendance, a more than tenfold increase over recent COPs.
Their message to international climate-action decision makers is simple: Indigenous Peoples ... 
It’s called the Gladiator Strategy.
The Swiss CEO of a shoe company stirred his espresso as he tried to convince me of his preferred way of working: “I think a battle of ideas is so important. It helps us fight things out, so the one idea left standing is the absolute best idea.”
In Roman times, the best gladiators weren’t necessarily the best athletes or the strongest physical performers but the ones who knew how to entertain the crowds in the way the emperor loved. Whatever, whoever amused the emperor was given the thumbs-up. The workplace parallel is perhaps obvious: People can “win” internal fights in those boardrooms by arguing for the ideas and perspectives that the boss already loves. So “fighting for the best idea” becomes a public way to endorse and validate the emperor’s — er, boss’s — opinions.
I asked, “You believe that putting people and their ideas under extreme pressure will yield diamonds?”
“Yes!” he answered enthusiastically, as if I was finally understanding him.
Some coffee spilled.
I really didn’t want to burst his bubble, but I also knew that his beloved ... 
Sometimes, when Jim Belushi feels anxious, he tells himself he’s actually just stoked. “Physiologically,” the actor, comedian, and entrepreneur tells Big Think, “what happens to your body when you’re nervous or fearful is exactly the same thing as what happens when you’re excited,” so all you need to do is flip a switch. It’s one of several tricks he learned early in life that stuck with him throughout the various chapters of his long and storied career, from Hollywood to Oregon pot farm.
Born to Albanian-American parents in the suburbs of Chicago, Belushi began acting in high school — an experience, he once told the Connecticut Post, that “made me feel good for the first time in my life.” Following in the footsteps of elder sibling John Belushi, he cut his teeth at Chicago’s renowned Second City improv troupe before joining the cast of Saturday Night Live while the program was in the middle of its golden age.
After John tragically passed away from a drug overdose at age 33, Jim honored the Belushi legacy by joining the TV-movie-music phenomenon, The Blues ... 
Here on Earth, it seems easy and straightforward to know “where” anything is, or to know “when” an event either occurred or will occur. After all, we’ve mapped out the entire surface of the Earth, and can define our location with three coordinates — latitude, longitude, and altitude/depth — no matter where in the world we are. Additionally, we’ve synchronized all methods of timekeeping here on Earth with atomic clocks, enabling people from all different locations on Earth to know both the “when” and “where” any event occurs, will occur, or has occurred.
But this relies on an underlying assumption that most of us make without ever thinking twice about it: that you, from your location on Earth, are observing the same “here and now” as anyone else in any other location on Earth. Unfortunately, those ideas were proven to be incorrect more than a hundred years ago. We now recognize that even ideas like “when” and “where” are subject to the laws of Einstein’s relativity, and that in relativity, space and time are not absolute quantities, but rather are relative ... 
I read Mark Lynas’s book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet when I was 14 years old, and it scared the life out of me. Lynas takes the reader on a journey of what to expect from a world that’s one degree warmer, two degrees, three degrees, all the way up to six degrees. By the middle of the book, your blood pressure is high; by the end, you’re on the floor.
It is a well-researched book that offers us a window into many possible futures. Fortunately, the scientific consensus has moved away from the most extreme scenarios since its publication. Unfortunately, a lot of the public messaging has not. Many people believe a pathway to 5°C or 6°C is already locked in, and the only thing we can do now is prepare for the worst.
Let’s look at what the latest science says about where we might end up by 2100.
If no countries stepped up their climate efforts, simply preserving what they already put in place, we might end up at 2.5°C to 3°C higher than preindustrial temperatures by the end ... 
On a rough day, it’s rarely the workload that breaks you. It’s the human layer: the meeting that turns tense, the work chat message you read as disrespect, the impulse to fire off a reply that feels righteous for thirty seconds and costly for a week. In those moments, emotional intelligence is basically the difference between staying aligned and creating unforced errors.
You may not control the situation, but you can control how you meet it. You can stay aligned, or drift into unforced errors: reactive words, sloppy decisions, needless conflict.
Confucius even gives a compact checklist for this: nine “states of mind” to return to in the middle of ordinary life. In the Analects he writes:
The superior person has nine states of mind:
for eyes: bright
for ears: penetrating
for countenance: cordial
for demeanor: humble
for words: trustworthy
for service: reverent
for doubt: questioning
for anger: circumspect
for facing a chance to profit: moral
Here “superior person” does not mean a status flex. It means the mature person, the person training character. These aren’t abstract virtues floating above ordinary life. They’re trainable capacities, ways of seeing, listening, speaking, and acting that ...