“Rawdogging” is a deeply unfortunate term that was popularized with fresh connotations a couple of years back, when people started using the word to describe the unmediated friction of sitting through a flight without any distractions. Video after video began to appear on TikTok, each featuring someone engaging in quaint, analogue activities like looking out the window, people watching, or staring vaguely ahead while thinking. There is something confronting about taking a form of introspection — a term formalized by early psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener to refer to conscious inward focus with a view to self-understanding — and giving it a name that originally described having unprotected sex. A little unfortunate, perhaps, because despite its name, rawdogging is neither new nor useless. People have been doing nothing — and doing it constructively — for aeons. It’s only in recent history that we’ve developed an anxious and avoidant relationship with downtime.
This revived form of introspection saw TikTokers, rather than early psychologists, declining to use technology to distract themselves (unless, of course, we count the bit where they’re recording) in ... Continue Reading »
You might think that the best leaders possess a long list of competencies. Perhaps you’ve read books detailing these competencies, or perhaps your company measures its leaders against some required list, using 360-degree surveys or performance ratings.
No matter how specific these lists are, or how tightly the ratings are tied to specific behaviors, the overwhelming body of data-based evidence reveals that all of these lists lack validity: We have no reliable way of measuring leader competencies, and so no valid way of proving that the best leaders possess more of them than average leaders.
The fact is, the best leaders do not have much in common at all. They do not all possess the same list of competencies. Nor do these leaders get better by identifying and then trying to acquire the competencies on the list that they lack.
Yes, it might be desirable for a leader to possess strategic thinking or executive presence or emotional intelligence, but the data shows that all of these skills are simply nice-to-haves. For every leader who excels at strategic thinking, you find a different excellent ... Continue Reading »
Of all the planets, star systems, and galaxies we’ve ever discovered, the only one that displays any yet-detected signals of life is right here: planet Earth which orbits the Sun right here in our own Milky Way. While there are:
hundreds of known planetary bodies in our own Solar System,
more than 6000 known exoplanets detected so far,
approximately 400 billion stars located within the Milky Way,
and trillions of galaxies within the observable Universe,
each one of them only represents a chance for life and living beings here in 2026. At present, only Earth, of all the known worlds, and only our Solar System, out of the 2 × 10²¹ stars suspected to exist in the visible Universe, has been demonstrated to have living organisms thriving upon it.
But any world that’s home to life is also, inevitably, going to be home to death as well. Earth may be the only known planet with life on it, but it’s also the only known planet with war, conflict, and murder on it as well. From up close, these tensions are palpable, and their effects on the ... Continue Reading »
Sneaky sideways moves that strong chess players swear by are called “intermezzos,” or “in-between moves.” The American chess genius and unofficial World Champion Paul Morphy executed these many times in the New Orleans cafés where he won game after game in the 1800s. Morphy’s move seemed obvious. Why not just recapture the piece that was just taken? But then, BOOM. Morphy interrupted the sequence with a different aggressive move, throwing his opponent’s position into turmoil. Intermezzos are shocking. When Judit Polgár played one against another top grandmaster, he jumped out of his chair. Intermezzos are reminders that instead of looking far in advance, we should search for little surprises that no one else sees.
The futility of planning far in advance is nailed in one of my favorite one-liners, from the late comedian Mitch Hedberg:
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me that question.”
Indeed, five-year plans fall apart when encountering the unexpected — like a global pandemic, for example. I think of five-year plans as five future me’s. I consider the overlapping risks ... Continue Reading »
In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, claimed that every two days, humanity was creating as much information as it had generated from the dawn of civilization through 2003 — 48 hours’ worth of texts, photos, articles, tweets, and other content added up to more than five exabytes of data, according to Schmidt.
Since then, generative AI has helped take our shift from information scarcity to information abundance to a whole new level — as of September 2025, we were generating more than 16 exabytes every hour.
AI-generated content now accounts for an increasing share of the information we generate — some estimates suggest that it could soon exceed human-generated content. As this trend continues, content made by humans could become relatively scarce, and because scarcity creates value, the human touch will become more valuable.
Long gone are the debates about whether AI can effectively mimic humans, though, and the better ... Continue Reading »
Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, stars formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation.
However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a star formed back at the beginning of the Universe should still be alive today. Of course, galaxies are messy places, and a far greater number of stars have formed since those early times, making the task of finding such a relic more challenging than even the classic needle-in-a-haystack problem.
Remarkably, by examining stars in ... Continue Reading »
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.
Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®
But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the ... Continue Reading »
“Who owns intelligence?”
Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it?
More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence.
While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also been used to deterministically sort people into groups and write off others entirely. Seeing injustice justified with IQ, educators grew increasingly fed up with the indicator in the second half of the 20th century. Such a narrow definition of intelligence simply didn’t comport with the range of cognitive abilities teachers observed in their students.
... Continue Reading »
Until April of 2026, only 24 astronauts had ever left low-Earth orbit.
The Apollo 11 crew, after safely returning to Earth from their historic voyage to the Moon, are shown in the Mobile Quarantine Facility alongside then-President Nixon. All 24 astronauts who journeyed to the Moon as part of the Apollo program, either orbiting or landing on it, were safely returned to Earth.
Credit: NASA/JSC
In 1968, Apollo astronaut Bill Anders — one of the first — captured this iconic photograph.
This photograph, taken aboard the Apollo 8 mission and simply dubbed “Earthrise,” has often been called the most environmentally impactful photograph in human history. Its taker, Bill Anders, remarked, “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon, I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, ‘Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.'”
Credit: NASA/Apollo 8
In 1972, humans journeyed to the Moon for the 9th time: aboard Apollo 17.
The launch of Apollo 17, the 8th and final crewed mission ... Continue Reading »
When you think about the word “anxiety,” it likely comes with a negative connotation. But anxiety is a normal human emotion that nearly all of us experience. Reframing anxiety as a tool for change, adopting concepts from Zen Buddhism, and striving to live in a ‘flow state’ can quell the negative thoughts we experience and amplify your mind’s abilities.
Optimizing your brain so that you can work in harmony with your thoughts is entirely possible. These 3 experts explain how we can work with our physiology, rather than try to rebel against it.
Authors Steven Kotler and Wendy Suzuki along with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger show us how to optimize our mind, transform anxiety, and drop into ‘flow state’ for a more peaceful life.
This video is part of Big Think’s monthly issue The Roots of Resilience.
This video Reboot your mind for flow, unanxiousness, and resilience is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
“Rawdogging” is a deeply unfortunate term that was popularized with fresh connotations a couple of years back, when people started using the word to describe the unmediated friction of sitting through a flight without any distractions. Video after video began to appear on TikTok, each featuring someone engaging in quaint, analogue activities like looking out the window, people watching, or staring vaguely ahead while thinking. There is something confronting about taking a form of introspection — a term formalized by early psychologists Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener to refer to conscious inward focus with a view to self-understanding — and giving it a name that originally described having unprotected sex. A little unfortunate, perhaps, because despite its name, rawdogging is neither new nor useless. People have been doing nothing — and doing it constructively — for aeons. It’s only in recent history that we’ve developed an anxious and avoidant relationship with downtime.
This revived form of introspection saw TikTokers, rather than early psychologists, declining to use technology to distract themselves (unless, of course, we count the bit where they’re recording) in ... 
You might think that the best leaders possess a long list of competencies. Perhaps you’ve read books detailing these competencies, or perhaps your company measures its leaders against some required list, using 360-degree surveys or performance ratings.
No matter how specific these lists are, or how tightly the ratings are tied to specific behaviors, the overwhelming body of data-based evidence reveals that all of these lists lack validity: We have no reliable way of measuring leader competencies, and so no valid way of proving that the best leaders possess more of them than average leaders.
The fact is, the best leaders do not have much in common at all. They do not all possess the same list of competencies. Nor do these leaders get better by identifying and then trying to acquire the competencies on the list that they lack.
Yes, it might be desirable for a leader to possess strategic thinking or executive presence or emotional intelligence, but the data shows that all of these skills are simply nice-to-haves. For every leader who excels at strategic thinking, you find a different excellent ... 
Of all the planets, star systems, and galaxies we’ve ever discovered, the only one that displays any yet-detected signals of life is right here: planet Earth which orbits the Sun right here in our own Milky Way. While there are:
hundreds of known planetary bodies in our own Solar System,
more than 6000 known exoplanets detected so far,
approximately 400 billion stars located within the Milky Way,
and trillions of galaxies within the observable Universe,
each one of them only represents a chance for life and living beings here in 2026. At present, only Earth, of all the known worlds, and only our Solar System, out of the 2 × 10²¹ stars suspected to exist in the visible Universe, has been demonstrated to have living organisms thriving upon it.
But any world that’s home to life is also, inevitably, going to be home to death as well. Earth may be the only known planet with life on it, but it’s also the only known planet with war, conflict, and murder on it as well. From up close, these tensions are palpable, and their effects on the ... 
Sneaky sideways moves that strong chess players swear by are called “intermezzos,” or “in-between moves.” The American chess genius and unofficial World Champion Paul Morphy executed these many times in the New Orleans cafés where he won game after game in the 1800s. Morphy’s move seemed obvious. Why not just recapture the piece that was just taken? But then, BOOM. Morphy interrupted the sequence with a different aggressive move, throwing his opponent’s position into turmoil. Intermezzos are shocking. When Judit Polgár played one against another top grandmaster, he jumped out of his chair. Intermezzos are reminders that instead of looking far in advance, we should search for little surprises that no one else sees.
The futility of planning far in advance is nailed in one of my favorite one-liners, from the late comedian Mitch Hedberg:
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me that question.”
Indeed, five-year plans fall apart when encountering the unexpected — like a global pandemic, for example. I think of five-year plans as five future me’s. I consider the overlapping risks ... 
In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, claimed that every two days, humanity was creating as much information as it had generated from the dawn of civilization through 2003 — 48 hours’ worth of texts, photos, articles, tweets, and other content added up to more than five exabytes of data, according to Schmidt.
Since then, generative AI has helped take our shift from information scarcity to information abundance to a whole new level — as of September 2025, we were generating more than 16 exabytes every hour.
AI-generated content now accounts for an increasing share of the information we generate — some estimates suggest that it could soon exceed human-generated content. As this trend continues, content made by humans could become relatively scarce, and because scarcity creates value, the human touch will become more valuable.
Long gone are the debates about whether AI can effectively mimic humans, though, and the better ... 
Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, stars formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the stars we see today. However, once those first stars die, their ejecta — depending on your perspective — either “enrich” or “pollute” the interstellar medium around them, meaning that the next generation of stars to form, and all generations thereafter, will be substantially different from that first generation.
However, unlike the first generation of stars, all subsequent generations should have the capability of producing small, red, low-mass stars that burn through their fuel quite slowly: so slowly that even a star formed back at the beginning of the Universe should still be alive today. Of course, galaxies are messy places, and a far greater number of stars have formed since those early times, making the task of finding such a relic more challenging than even the classic needle-in-a-haystack problem.
Remarkably, by examining stars in ... 
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray.
Well, gray-ish. From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.
Dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®
But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the ... 
“Who owns intelligence?”
Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, or what, has it?
More than a century ago, psychometricians staked their claim by proposing the almighty g, or general intelligence. They measured it with IQ tests, which assess cognitive abilities such as verbal reasoning, working memory, and visual-spatial skills. Eventually, psychometricians convinced much of Western society that, through IQ, they were the arbiters of intelligence.
While the IQ test has been used nobly — to identify students in need of extra help with reading or writing, for example — it has also been used to deterministically sort people into groups and write off others entirely. Seeing injustice justified with IQ, educators grew increasingly fed up with the indicator in the second half of the 20th century. Such a narrow definition of intelligence simply didn’t comport with the range of cognitive abilities teachers observed in their students.
... 
Until April of 2026, only 24 astronauts had ever left low-Earth orbit.
The Apollo 11 crew, after safely returning to Earth from their historic voyage to the Moon, are shown in the Mobile Quarantine Facility alongside then-President Nixon. All 24 astronauts who journeyed to the Moon as part of the Apollo program, either orbiting or landing on it, were safely returned to Earth.
Credit: NASA/JSC
In 1968, Apollo astronaut Bill Anders — one of the first — captured this iconic photograph.
This photograph, taken aboard the Apollo 8 mission and simply dubbed “Earthrise,” has often been called the most environmentally impactful photograph in human history. Its taker, Bill Anders, remarked, “When I looked up and saw the Earth coming up on this very stark, beat-up Moon horizon, I was immediately almost overcome with the thought, ‘Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth.'”
Credit: NASA/Apollo 8
In 1972, humans journeyed to the Moon for the 9th time: aboard Apollo 17.
The launch of Apollo 17, the 8th and final crewed mission ...