Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued slightly red, and almost completely surrounded by carved, rocky hills. It was here, a half-century ago, that NASA engineers tested nuclear rockets intended to get us to the Red Planet by 1978.
Officials had even grander hopes for the descendants of those rockets. They were planned to be mules for a permanent lunar base by 1981, propulsion systems for deep space probes to Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, and engines for “space tugs” and shuttles ferrying payloads and people from low Earth orbit (LEO) to space stations around the Earth and the Moon. NASA even envisioned a “Grand Tour” of the Solar System propelled by nuclear rockets, taking advantage of a planetary alignment that happens every 174 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with one sweeping mission between 1976 and 1980.
Why didn’t this glorious space future come to pass? What went wrong? Well, ... Continue Reading »
“The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a classic example.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his “intoxication thesis.” Slingerland argues it’s quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang bawdy songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. Alcohol is effectively a poison. Our bodies don’t like it — or so the argument goes.
The intoxication thesis says this is all wrong. For Slingerland, drinking alcohol and getting drunk are important to human well-being and complex societies. It might not be what evolution “intended,” but it’s certainly given us ... Continue Reading »
Why are bad habits so hard to break?
Neuroscientist Carl Hart, PhD, journalist Charles Duhigg, and psychologist Adam Alter, PhD explain how your brain wires habits as cue-routine-reward loops that control nearly half of your daily life. They show why willpower alone rarely works, why technology fuels new forms of addiction, and why habits can only be replaced, not erased.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
This video Addictions and habits, explained by a neuroscientist, a psychologist, and a journalist is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Here on Earth, humanity’s global energy needs only seem to increase over time. A combination of increasing populations, the widespread development of heating and cooling, a reliance on modern electronics, and the introduction of new energy-intensive technologies (such as the blockchain, smart technology, and artificial intelligence) are among the factors driving our rising energy needs. Sure, we can always build more power plants, but what about the simple solution of increasing the efficiency and production of already-existing plants, particularly the ones that only see part-time usage: wind and solar. Wind power doesn’t work when the air is still, and solar doesn’t work during the night.
Or can it?
That’s something that the US-based startup, Reflect Orbital, wants to change. The idea is to produce, as they put it, “sunlight on demand” — and light pollution by design — with plans to launch thousands (or possibly hundreds of thousands) of reflective satellites that would use mirrors to beam sunlight, collected in low-Earth orbit, onto the locations of already-existing solar power plants on Earth. By shining this light onto the power plants, even at ... Continue Reading »
Hutch, who had taught Julia the art of visualization, had told her that the nature of anything, including cognition, was best understood in the doing. She missed his wisdom.
Instead of struggling against the infected artificial brain in its frozen state, she had to reanimate it.
First, she needed space. In the same way writers always wanted bigger desks and programmers craved bigger monitors, she had to find a canvas large enough to visualize the living neuromesh. Mixed reality was the only answer.
Pushing her coffee table to the wall and stacking the chairs, she cleared the center of her apartment as much as possible. Talos would just have to do its best to map whatever debris was left into the visualization.
Next, she needed a “brain jar.” Digging through her crates of salvaged hardware — being a pack rat for old hardware was a prerequisite when one’s hobby was building shape-shifting drones — she found a bunch of graphics cards pulled from used gaming PCs. These she plugged into a retired crypto mining rig until the whole assembly looked like matzot stuffed haphazardly ... Continue Reading »
On a busy day, over 25,000 people visit the Vatican Museum in Vatican City, the world’s smallest country at 0.17 square miles, tucked in the middle of Rome. While the museum boasts one of the greatest collections of art in the world, the main attraction for many people (including me on my first-ever trip abroad) is the Sistine Chapel, with its massive ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo at the start of the 16th century.
Getting into the chapel, though, requires a substantial time commitment. The relatively low entrance price of twenty euros means that many more people want to see the chapel than the 5,800 square feet (or 540 square meters) of space can accommodate. If you have not pre-purchased premium tickets to enter the museum, you must wait in a physical line to buy one. That wait time can be as long as three or four hours, particularly during the summer, when there are more tourists. That line is followed by another to go through security to get into the museum. Lines can be even longer on the last Sunday ... Continue Reading »
The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn’t its eponymous effigy; it’s realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance’s maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.
Tales that rely on cheap tricks can be fun, but the ones that exhume their horrors from within powerful ideas endure.
For that reason, we’re taking a look at five horror stories that double as philosophy lessons. Each one rests on a foundation of great ideas that can wrap around your mind like a tentacle and force you to really think about what has frightened you.
Cover of a 2025 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Credit: MinaLima / Harper)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was ... Continue Reading »
Brands that stand the test of time innovate to stay relevant and build upon the product imagery that first captured customers’ hearts. So-called legacy brands and their associated images include Timberland boots, the Burberry raincoat, Tiffany diamonds, and Levi’s jeans. Even Disney, whose fantasy characters remain central to the customer experience. Each consumer-facing brand expanded its appeal while staying true to its foundational equities. Conservative Burberry got sexy by putting its tartan pattern on bikinis. Tiffany signed Elsa Peretti to design more accessibly priced silver and gold jewelry that was still distinctively elegant. Traditional Disney acquired Pixar’s more modern storytelling. By definition, legacy brands can also survive a spate of bad management, bad economies, even bad luck — but not in perpetuity.
Was Coach a legacy brand? We first put our distinctive glovetanned leather bags into people’s hands back in the 1960s, and they not only used them, they also cherished them. Now, as we entered a new decade (the 2000s), we were striving to create products people loved by embodying our brand’s fundamental equities — quality, function, durability — but also ... Continue Reading »
In the 1920s, we first measured the distances to objects beyond our own Milky Way and swiftly discovered that the Universe was expanding: consistent with how Einstein’s general relativity tells us the Universe would evolve. If the Universe was expanding today, that implies it was smaller — and hotter, and denser, and more uniform — in the past, leading to the idea of the hot Big Bang. Starting in the 1960s, the Big Bang’s greatest predictions were confirmed, leading to widespread acceptance of the theory. However, a few unexplained puzzles remained, leading scientists to question whether the most extreme predictions of the Big Bang, including arbitrarily high temperatures and an origin from a singularity, were actually correct.
In the early 1980s, a revolutionary new theory was proposed, intending to solve those puzzles: cosmic inflation. Theorists rushed to work on inflation, figuring out which “flavors” of inflation successfully led to a hot Big Bang and then making a series of predictions that could be compared and tested against the differing predictions of the Big Bang without inflation. Over the 80s, 90s, and ... Continue Reading »
In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.
It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of ... Continue Reading »
Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued slightly red, and almost completely surrounded by carved, rocky hills. It was here, a half-century ago, that NASA engineers tested nuclear rockets intended to get us to the Red Planet by 1978.
Officials had even grander hopes for the descendants of those rockets. They were planned to be mules for a permanent lunar base by 1981, propulsion systems for deep space probes to Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets, and engines for “space tugs” and shuttles ferrying payloads and people from low Earth orbit (LEO) to space stations around the Earth and the Moon. NASA even envisioned a “Grand Tour” of the Solar System propelled by nuclear rockets, taking advantage of a planetary alignment that happens every 174 years to visit Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune with one sweeping mission between 1976 and 1980.
Why didn’t this glorious space future come to pass? What went wrong? Well, ... 
“The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a classic example.
In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with Slingerland about his book Drunk, in which he outlines his “intoxication thesis.” Slingerland argues it’s quite common to think that getting drunk is an evolutionary mistake. Some early Homo sapiens drank too much fermented fruit juice and discovered it was pretty fun. So they told their mates and, altogether, they clinked their frothy ciders and sang bawdy songs about hunting and gathering. But the human brain and body were not built to get drunk. Alcohol is effectively a poison. Our bodies don’t like it — or so the argument goes.
The intoxication thesis says this is all wrong. For Slingerland, drinking alcohol and getting drunk are important to human well-being and complex societies. It might not be what evolution “intended,” but it’s certainly given us ... 
Here on Earth, humanity’s global energy needs only seem to increase over time. A combination of increasing populations, the widespread development of heating and cooling, a reliance on modern electronics, and the introduction of new energy-intensive technologies (such as the blockchain, smart technology, and artificial intelligence) are among the factors driving our rising energy needs. Sure, we can always build more power plants, but what about the simple solution of increasing the efficiency and production of already-existing plants, particularly the ones that only see part-time usage: wind and solar. Wind power doesn’t work when the air is still, and solar doesn’t work during the night.
Or can it?
That’s something that the US-based startup, Reflect Orbital, wants to change. The idea is to produce, as they put it, “sunlight on demand” — and light pollution by design — with plans to launch thousands (or possibly hundreds of thousands) of reflective satellites that would use mirrors to beam sunlight, collected in low-Earth orbit, onto the locations of already-existing solar power plants on Earth. By shining this light onto the power plants, even at ... 
Hutch, who had taught Julia the art of visualization, had told her that the nature of anything, including cognition, was best understood in the doing. She missed his wisdom.
Instead of struggling against the infected artificial brain in its frozen state, she had to reanimate it.
First, she needed space. In the same way writers always wanted bigger desks and programmers craved bigger monitors, she had to find a canvas large enough to visualize the living neuromesh. Mixed reality was the only answer.
Pushing her coffee table to the wall and stacking the chairs, she cleared the center of her apartment as much as possible. Talos would just have to do its best to map whatever debris was left into the visualization.
Next, she needed a “brain jar.” Digging through her crates of salvaged hardware — being a pack rat for old hardware was a prerequisite when one’s hobby was building shape-shifting drones — she found a bunch of graphics cards pulled from used gaming PCs. These she plugged into a retired crypto mining rig until the whole assembly looked like matzot stuffed haphazardly ... 
On a busy day, over 25,000 people visit the Vatican Museum in Vatican City, the world’s smallest country at 0.17 square miles, tucked in the middle of Rome. While the museum boasts one of the greatest collections of art in the world, the main attraction for many people (including me on my first-ever trip abroad) is the Sistine Chapel, with its massive ceiling frescoes painted by Michelangelo at the start of the 16th century.
Getting into the chapel, though, requires a substantial time commitment. The relatively low entrance price of twenty euros means that many more people want to see the chapel than the 5,800 square feet (or 540 square meters) of space can accommodate. If you have not pre-purchased premium tickets to enter the museum, you must wait in a physical line to buy one. That wait time can be as long as three or four hours, particularly during the summer, when there are more tourists. That line is followed by another to go through security to get into the museum. Lines can be even longer on the last Sunday ... 
The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn’t its eponymous effigy; it’s realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting the Overlook Hotel may unnerve readers of The Shining, it is Jack Torrance’s maniacal relapse that truly grips the spine.
Tales that rely on cheap tricks can be fun, but the ones that exhume their horrors from within powerful ideas endure.
For that reason, we’re taking a look at five horror stories that double as philosophy lessons. Each one rests on a foundation of great ideas that can wrap around your mind like a tentacle and force you to really think about what has frightened you.
Cover of a 2025 edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Credit: MinaLima / Harper)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
“My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was ... 
Brands that stand the test of time innovate to stay relevant and build upon the product imagery that first captured customers’ hearts. So-called legacy brands and their associated images include Timberland boots, the Burberry raincoat, Tiffany diamonds, and Levi’s jeans. Even Disney, whose fantasy characters remain central to the customer experience. Each consumer-facing brand expanded its appeal while staying true to its foundational equities. Conservative Burberry got sexy by putting its tartan pattern on bikinis. Tiffany signed Elsa Peretti to design more accessibly priced silver and gold jewelry that was still distinctively elegant. Traditional Disney acquired Pixar’s more modern storytelling. By definition, legacy brands can also survive a spate of bad management, bad economies, even bad luck — but not in perpetuity.
Was Coach a legacy brand? We first put our distinctive glovetanned leather bags into people’s hands back in the 1960s, and they not only used them, they also cherished them. Now, as we entered a new decade (the 2000s), we were striving to create products people loved by embodying our brand’s fundamental equities — quality, function, durability — but also ... 
In the 1920s, we first measured the distances to objects beyond our own Milky Way and swiftly discovered that the Universe was expanding: consistent with how Einstein’s general relativity tells us the Universe would evolve. If the Universe was expanding today, that implies it was smaller — and hotter, and denser, and more uniform — in the past, leading to the idea of the hot Big Bang. Starting in the 1960s, the Big Bang’s greatest predictions were confirmed, leading to widespread acceptance of the theory. However, a few unexplained puzzles remained, leading scientists to question whether the most extreme predictions of the Big Bang, including arbitrarily high temperatures and an origin from a singularity, were actually correct.
In the early 1980s, a revolutionary new theory was proposed, intending to solve those puzzles: cosmic inflation. Theorists rushed to work on inflation, figuring out which “flavors” of inflation successfully led to a hot Big Bang and then making a series of predictions that could be compared and tested against the differing predictions of the Big Bang without inflation. Over the 80s, 90s, and ... 
In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, comprised over 1,200 literary forgeries spanning centuries, languages, and countries — beautifully bound manuscripts carrying black ink annotations allegedly penned by Shakespeare; works written by Sicilian tyrants, Roman poets, and Etruscan prophets; poems by famous priests and theologians — all of them in part or entirely fabricated.
It was an unusual task for a scholar dedicated to studying the truth, but Havens was adamant. “We have never before needed a collection like this more than we need it right now,” he told the Dean of Libraries at the time. The internet and the increasing popularity of social media were changing how information was written, disseminated, and consumed, giving rise to the phenomenon of fake news as we now know it. In such a “crazy, rapid-fire information world,” the collection of ancient lies and misrepresentations of ...