The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
A generous helping of moral turpitude
Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster.
On the Future Map of North America by Gordon-Michael Scallion, three major seismic upheavals inundate most of the American West, as well as parts of the East Coast and much of the Mississippi and St Lawrence valleys, which are now connected via the Great Lakes (now a Great Sea). ... Continue Reading »
As artificial intelligence has become a mainstream and ubiquitous tool for hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the world — specifically, through chatbots and large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, and many others — it’s both enabled new pathways for problem solving and also led to new pitfalls for students, early career professionals, and non-experts seeking to mimic the illusion of expertise. While many who create, sell, or promote LLMs laud their use cases, a significant worry has arisen among students, teachers, professors, and education researchers: that students are not using these artificial tools to enhance their learning, but rather to replace it, outsourcing the hard and rewarding work of critical thought to these LLMs simply by prompt-hacking them.
To be certain, this is a real problem, and a real new way that students (as well as many others) are using the tools at their disposal to complete their assigned work, with the consequence of short-cutting their own intellectual development. But how big of a problem is this really, and who does it impact the ... Continue Reading »
Quantum computing won’t just be an upgrade to the digital machines we use today – it represents a seismic shift in the entire logic that built the digital age.
Michio Kaku explains why computing on atoms (rather than on transistors) could overturn assumptions that have shaped everything from global security to modern medicine.
This video Michio Kaku: How quantum computers compute in multiple universes at once is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
When I look at the state of leadership development today, I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution. After speaking with 158 L&D professionals across industries for our latest study, one thing became very clear: despite significant investment, most organizations don’t feel their leadership programs are delivering what leaders actually need. Many leaders are overwhelmed, anxious, and stretched thin. Only 40% of the practitioners we surveyed said they were even “somewhat happy” with their leadership development outcomes. That should be a wake-up call for all of us.
In this moment of uncertainty and rapid technological change, leadership development can no longer be a static set of workshops or a content repository. It has to be a living system that supports real humans, doing difficult and very human work.
Based on the research and on countless conversations in our Offbeat community, here are the five recommendations I believe will shape leadership development in 2026.
1. Strategy
One of the biggest misses I see is when leadership development operates in parallel to the business instead of serving it. If your company is focused ... Continue Reading »
The transformation of urban mobility through vehicle automation presents two distinct paths: the widespread adoption of privately owned automated vehicles or a transition to robotaxi fleets. While both scenarios promise technological advancement, the robotaxi model offers compelling advantages for urban efficiency, sustainability, and social equity, but only if implemented with careful attention to policy design and public benefit.
The superiority of the robotaxi model stems from several key factors. First, it promises a more efficient use of urban infrastructure. Where private vehicles typically sit idle 95% of the time, requiring ubiquitous public and private parking infrastructure, robotaxis can serve multiple users sequentially and potentially simultaneously, dramatically reducing parking requirements and freeing urban spaces for other uses. This efficiency extends beyond parking and roadway utilization to fleet management: Robotaxis’ shorter life cycle (2.5 versus 12 years for private vehicles) enables a faster adoption of safety improvements and other technological advancements.
The robotaxi model also offers a greater potential for the systematic optimization of urban mobility. Through centralized fleet management and orchestration, robotaxi systems can help manage congestion, regulate traffic flow, and even influence ... Continue Reading »
Back in the 1960s, NASA spent millions of dollars designing a zero-gravity pen. The Russians, on the other hand, used a pencil.
This story — which, I admit, is likely apocryphal — underscores something we see every day across work and life. We pour massive amounts of time and energy into complex solutions for complex problems. Sometimes, the answer is as simple as using a pencil.
Which begs a bigger question: Why are we all so drawn to complexity in the first place? To explore this, I’d recommend a sharp essay by Carl Hendrick titled, “Why Does Thinking Feel So Hard?”
Hendrick explains why “smart,” complicated solutions can feel productive, even when they’re not. Sometimes you really do need to invent a zero-gravity pen for a very challenging issue. Other times, a bit of graphite and wood will do the job just fine.
Key quote: “[Psychologist R.H.] Waters claimed that students instinctively chose the route that demands the least mental work. But strangely, they did this even when they knew a more effortful pathway would lead to deeper understanding. At a time when psychology ... Continue Reading »
In the introductory chapter of her book Empire of AI, author Karen Hao explains how Sam Altman’s temporary ouster from OpenAI in November 2023 was the result of an ideological rift that tore the organization’s leadership in half. No one contested OpenAI’s founding goal — to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI), once developed, would benefit rather than destroy or enslave humanity — but there had been growing disagreement on the best way to reach it.
One side, united under Altman, argued that the funds required to create AGI could only be secured if OpenAI transformed from a nonprofit into a for-profit entity, while the other believed the introduction of private capital into the organization would get in the way of AGI serving its intended purpose. Altman’s side won, and the rest is history.
Hao was in the middle of an interview when news of the ultimately unsuccessful coup first emerged — not that the event significantly changed her view on the company or its role in the world.
When Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI, they already had an egotistical motive.
Karen Hao
As the veteran ... Continue Reading »
We often talk about searching for truth in the world, and find ourselves at odds with people who seek it differently from how we do. But in many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth: the truth of our reality as shared by each and every one of us. By asking the natural world and Universe questions about itself, we seek to gain an understanding of:
what the Universe is like,
what the rules that govern it are,
and how things came to be the way they are today.
Science is neither a collection of facts nor merely a process, but rather the combination of both. All at once, science is simultaneously the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, as well as the process through which we perform those investigations and refine our conclusions based on an ever-increasing set of data.
It might be easy to see how we gain knowledge from that endeavor, but it’s less clear how that knowledge leads to an approximation of “the truth” of ... Continue Reading »
Human history is a paradox: we accumulate knowledge at astonishing speed, yet remain vulnerable to deception, superstition, and the stories that subtly steer entire civilizations.
From the first clay tablets to today’s global media systems, the structures that carry our ideas have always shaped what societies can build, believe, and destroy. That paradox is even more important in the age of AI, says Yuval Noah Harari.
This video Yuval Noah Harari: Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
A few years ago, during a particularly chaotic period at work, I started making my morning coffee the exact same way every day: same mug, same timing, same two minutes of silence while it brewed.
It wasn’t intentional; I was just too overwhelmed to think about it. But something interesting happened: Those two minutes became the calmest part of my day. Even when everything else felt out of control, I had this one predictable moment that somehow made the rest manageable.
I had just experienced the power of rituals completely by accident, and it wasn’t until I left tech to study neuroscience that I understood why that simple coffee routine had been so effective.
Rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind.
Most people think of rituals as elaborate religious ceremonies or ancient traditions. But your life is actually filled with them.
Waiting for everyone to be served before eating, giving presents for birthdays and holidays, saying “hello” and exchanging scripted pleasantries, clapping at the end of a performance — all of these are rituals woven throughout our days.
Since the dawn of ... Continue Reading »
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
A generous helping of moral turpitude
Depending on the prevailing panic, the nature of the Fall typically varies between half a dozen usual suspects: nuclear war, alien invasion, a deadly pandemic, technological breakdown, climate collapse, civil war — each often infused with a generous helping of moral turpitude to lubricate the disaster.
On the Future Map of North America by Gordon-Michael Scallion, three major seismic upheavals inundate most of the American West, as well as parts of the East Coast and much of the Mississippi and St Lawrence valleys, which are now connected via the Great Lakes (now a Great Sea). ... 
As artificial intelligence has become a mainstream and ubiquitous tool for hundreds of millions or even billions of people around the world — specifically, through chatbots and large language models (LLMs) like Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Llama, and many others — it’s both enabled new pathways for problem solving and also led to new pitfalls for students, early career professionals, and non-experts seeking to mimic the illusion of expertise. While many who create, sell, or promote LLMs laud their use cases, a significant worry has arisen among students, teachers, professors, and education researchers: that students are not using these artificial tools to enhance their learning, but rather to replace it, outsourcing the hard and rewarding work of critical thought to these LLMs simply by prompt-hacking them.
To be certain, this is a real problem, and a real new way that students (as well as many others) are using the tools at their disposal to complete their assigned work, with the consequence of short-cutting their own intellectual development. But how big of a problem is this really, and who does it impact the ... 
When I look at the state of leadership development today, I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution. After speaking with 158 L&D professionals across industries for our latest study, one thing became very clear: despite significant investment, most organizations don’t feel their leadership programs are delivering what leaders actually need. Many leaders are overwhelmed, anxious, and stretched thin. Only 40% of the practitioners we surveyed said they were even “somewhat happy” with their leadership development outcomes. That should be a wake-up call for all of us.
In this moment of uncertainty and rapid technological change, leadership development can no longer be a static set of workshops or a content repository. It has to be a living system that supports real humans, doing difficult and very human work.
Based on the research and on countless conversations in our Offbeat community, here are the five recommendations I believe will shape leadership development in 2026.
1. Strategy
One of the biggest misses I see is when leadership development operates in parallel to the business instead of serving it. If your company is focused ... 
The transformation of urban mobility through vehicle automation presents two distinct paths: the widespread adoption of privately owned automated vehicles or a transition to robotaxi fleets. While both scenarios promise technological advancement, the robotaxi model offers compelling advantages for urban efficiency, sustainability, and social equity, but only if implemented with careful attention to policy design and public benefit.
The superiority of the robotaxi model stems from several key factors. First, it promises a more efficient use of urban infrastructure. Where private vehicles typically sit idle 95% of the time, requiring ubiquitous public and private parking infrastructure, robotaxis can serve multiple users sequentially and potentially simultaneously, dramatically reducing parking requirements and freeing urban spaces for other uses. This efficiency extends beyond parking and roadway utilization to fleet management: Robotaxis’ shorter life cycle (2.5 versus 12 years for private vehicles) enables a faster adoption of safety improvements and other technological advancements.
The robotaxi model also offers a greater potential for the systematic optimization of urban mobility. Through centralized fleet management and orchestration, robotaxi systems can help manage congestion, regulate traffic flow, and even influence ... 
Back in the 1960s, NASA spent millions of dollars designing a zero-gravity pen. The Russians, on the other hand, used a pencil.
This story — which, I admit, is likely apocryphal — underscores something we see every day across work and life. We pour massive amounts of time and energy into complex solutions for complex problems. Sometimes, the answer is as simple as using a pencil.
Which begs a bigger question: Why are we all so drawn to complexity in the first place? To explore this, I’d recommend a sharp essay by Carl Hendrick titled, “Why Does Thinking Feel So Hard?”
Hendrick explains why “smart,” complicated solutions can feel productive, even when they’re not. Sometimes you really do need to invent a zero-gravity pen for a very challenging issue. Other times, a bit of graphite and wood will do the job just fine.
Key quote: “[Psychologist R.H.] Waters claimed that students instinctively chose the route that demands the least mental work. But strangely, they did this even when they knew a more effortful pathway would lead to deeper understanding. At a time when psychology ... 
In the introductory chapter of her book Empire of AI, author Karen Hao explains how Sam Altman’s temporary ouster from OpenAI in November 2023 was the result of an ideological rift that tore the organization’s leadership in half. No one contested OpenAI’s founding goal — to ensure artificial general intelligence (AGI), once developed, would benefit rather than destroy or enslave humanity — but there had been growing disagreement on the best way to reach it.
One side, united under Altman, argued that the funds required to create AGI could only be secured if OpenAI transformed from a nonprofit into a for-profit entity, while the other believed the introduction of private capital into the organization would get in the way of AGI serving its intended purpose. Altman’s side won, and the rest is history.
Hao was in the middle of an interview when news of the ultimately unsuccessful coup first emerged — not that the event significantly changed her view on the company or its role in the world.
When Musk and Altman co-founded OpenAI, they already had an egotistical motive.
Karen Hao
As the veteran ... 
We often talk about searching for truth in the world, and find ourselves at odds with people who seek it differently from how we do. But in many ways, the human endeavor of science is the ultimate pursuit of truth: the truth of our reality as shared by each and every one of us. By asking the natural world and Universe questions about itself, we seek to gain an understanding of:
what the Universe is like,
what the rules that govern it are,
and how things came to be the way they are today.
Science is neither a collection of facts nor merely a process, but rather the combination of both. All at once, science is simultaneously the full suite of knowledge that we gain from observing, measuring, and performing experiments that test the Universe, as well as the process through which we perform those investigations and refine our conclusions based on an ever-increasing set of data.
It might be easy to see how we gain knowledge from that endeavor, but it’s less clear how that knowledge leads to an approximation of “the truth” of ... 
A few years ago, during a particularly chaotic period at work, I started making my morning coffee the exact same way every day: same mug, same timing, same two minutes of silence while it brewed.
It wasn’t intentional; I was just too overwhelmed to think about it. But something interesting happened: Those two minutes became the calmest part of my day. Even when everything else felt out of control, I had this one predictable moment that somehow made the rest manageable.
I had just experienced the power of rituals completely by accident, and it wasn’t until I left tech to study neuroscience that I understood why that simple coffee routine had been so effective.
Rituals are some of the most powerful technologies invented by humankind.
Most people think of rituals as elaborate religious ceremonies or ancient traditions. But your life is actually filled with them.
Waiting for everyone to be served before eating, giving presents for birthdays and holidays, saying “hello” and exchanging scripted pleasantries, clapping at the end of a performance — all of these are rituals woven throughout our days.
Since the dawn of ...