Bryan Washington’s characters reveal themselves through what they don’t, won’t, or can’t say as much as the utterances they give voice to. Though he constructs his stories from the first-person perspective, his protagonists never exist in heroic isolation. Each is shaped — in ways small and large, superficial and profound, knowingly and unknowingly — by the people they interact with and the cultures they inhabit.
Most of Washington’s stories are set in Houston, where he grew up, or Japan, where he currently lives. Occasionally, as in Palaver, the author’s third novel, the two collide. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, Palaver tells the story of an unnamed son who moved from Texas to Tokyo to escape his homophobic brother, only to receive a surprise visit from his unnamed mother more than a decade later. Like much of Washington’s previous literary work, Palaver deals with themes of estrangement, loneliness, and forgiveness.
Unlike those works, as a review from the Washington Post points out, the novel errs on the side of hope. It “deconstructs the myriad ways we intentionally or unintentionally tear ... Continue Reading »
Most of us think happiness is something you achieve: status, money, accomplishment. Robert Waldinger’s work asks a more unsettling question: what if happiness is less about what you get and more about who you keep?
Drawing on the longest study of adult life ever conducted, Waldinger traces human wellbeing across 8 decades, from the Great Depression to old age, following people from radically different starting points to see what endures.
This video The happiness shortcut that hides in plain sight is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
When it comes to science in general, and physics in particular, we don’t just want to know what’s going to happen under a given set of circumstances. We also want to know the answer to the key question of, “how much,” “how many,” or “in what amount,” when it comes to our answers. Being quantitative, and answering questions of amounts and timescales, not merely qualitative, is what separates a successful physical theory from one that must be discarded. In the expanding Universe, this is more important than ever, as questions of what we expect to form, when, and in what quantities, are essential for testing whether our theories of the Universe actually match up with our observed reality.
Clearly, we live in a Universe where stars came into existence long ago: back in the first few hundred million years of cosmic history. But is what we see compatible with what physics predicts when we take the expanding, accelerating Universe into account? That’s the big inquiry put forth by Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Star formation makes qualitative sense: gas, ... Continue Reading »
How does life build complexity from pure chance? Sean B. Carroll takes up the “staircase of evolution,” showing how random mutation and natural selection shape everything from the smallest cells in our bodies to entire species.
If you want to understand the forces that silently govern life, this discussion reframes evolution as an active, ongoing process shaping every organism, including you.
This video The evolutionary logic of survival and death, in 54 minutes is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Over the last few years, AI has dazzled us all. It can write our emails, optimize our workflows, and create alarmingly realistic videos. But is it intelligent? Can it actually understand things?
I’m not so sure. This week, I published an essay for my Long Game column in Big Think about this idea. To do that, I tell a story about a slime mold that might just be more “intelligent” than a human — even though it has no brain. (No, I haven’t lost my marbles yet; read it and you’ll understand.)
The basic premise is this: the world is pouring incomprehensible amounts of energy and capital into building systems that mimic a single, narrow form of human intelligence. But in the process, we may be ignoring a far older, and potentially wiser, form of intelligence. It’s also a type of intelligence that is in high demand as the world changes faster than ever.
Key quote: “In our rush to create artificial minds, we seem to have forgotten to study the real ones. Because once you start noticing the intelligence threaded through the ... Continue Reading »
12.5 to 12.6 billion years after the beginning of the Universe.
On Earth, biological organisms are getting more and more interesting as the years tick by. As the unbroken chain of life continues, the combined factors of inheritance, random mutations, and horizontal gene transfer serve to increase the total amount of genetic information found in the genomes of the most complex organisms. This results in them gaining more specialized features, and many new characteristics begin emerging.
Some organisms thrive together in colonies, with identical unicellular lifeforms binding to one another to ensure that the majority of them survive and thrive. Other organisms develop multicellularity: the ability for a single organism to produce multiple component parts — cells — that all remain bound together as part of the original, parent organism. And still other organisms become differentiated, where new subcomponents develop within an organism, conferring features and abilities onto it that it didn’t possess before. At this moment in time, the last of these effects leads to an entirely new kingdom of life on Earth: the fungi.
Evolving well before plants or animals ... Continue Reading »
This December, like every December, will include a single moment — often marked by a particular day, which is December 21st here in 2025 — where our planet’s axial tilt is perfectly aligned with the invisible line connecting the Earth to the Sun. In December, it’s the northern hemisphere’s pole that’s tilted away from the Sun, while the southern hemisphere’s pole is tipped toward it; in June, the opposite situation is true. When your pole is tipped toward the Sun, your hemisphere experiences the longest days and shortest nights; when the pole is tipped away, you get long nights and short days. This remains true, solstice after solstice and year after year, no matter how much time passes.
Although there are many factors at play that determine the behavior of each planet — its spin and orbital angular momenta, the eccentricity of its orbit, the effects of general relativity and the other planets — there’s only one that determines when the solstices are: axial tilt. As every planet revolves around the Sun, it rotates on its axis, and only the orientation of that axis matters. ... Continue Reading »
Smartphones and social media are hijacking our younger generation’s childhood and development in a frightening way. Clare Morell, researcher and author of The Tech Exit, is sounding the alarm.
This video The terrifying ways that social media is altering teenage brains is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia but spent her formative teenage years in Nairobi, Kenya. For most of her youth, Islam was a distant, habitual backdrop. She observed the fasts, went to the mosque now and then, and perhaps idly carried a string of tasbih prayer beads. Then, in 1985, the Muslim Brotherhood swept through her community. Under the tutelage of a charismatic female teacher, Ali transformed. The casual tradition was replaced by a rigid, politicized fervor; she put on the heavy black hijab and learned to renounce Western culture.
Today, Ali is a Christian, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and a conservative powerhouse. But the path between then and now reveals a fracture in modern identity politics. When Ali first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, fleeing a forced marriage, she was lauded as a survivor — a Black, female, Muslim survivor. Here was someone who had been subjected to awful things — including genital mutilation — and her activism brought her recognition and celebration across the West.
But then, she started to say other things. She refused ... Continue Reading »
If asked to describe what sets a cognitively complex species like humans apart from others, many would list specific behaviors, such as telling stories, creating art, planning for the future, or navigating complex social structures. Given that, you might expect that neuroscientists attempting to understand the advanced brain would study it in action, as a person or animal moves through the world.
For much of its history, though, neuroscience has done the opposite.
“When I was a graduate student, neuroscience was almost entirely about isolating specific circuits to test how the brain controls your senses and movement,” says Dr. Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “You’d show an animal a stimulus, observe how it responded, and record which neurons fired.” This research defined foundational principles of the field, but according to Miller, when you study the brain at this level, “you’re really only looking at its edges.”
“We know surprisingly little about how the brain manages more complex cognitive behaviors, like making a decision or socializing,” says Felipe Parodi, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, ... Continue Reading »
Bryan Washington’s characters reveal themselves through what they don’t, won’t, or can’t say as much as the utterances they give voice to. Though he constructs his stories from the first-person perspective, his protagonists never exist in heroic isolation. Each is shaped — in ways small and large, superficial and profound, knowingly and unknowingly — by the people they interact with and the cultures they inhabit.
Most of Washington’s stories are set in Houston, where he grew up, or Japan, where he currently lives. Occasionally, as in Palaver, the author’s third novel, the two collide. A finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, Palaver tells the story of an unnamed son who moved from Texas to Tokyo to escape his homophobic brother, only to receive a surprise visit from his unnamed mother more than a decade later. Like much of Washington’s previous literary work, Palaver deals with themes of estrangement, loneliness, and forgiveness.
Unlike those works, as a review from the Washington Post points out, the novel errs on the side of hope. It “deconstructs the myriad ways we intentionally or unintentionally tear ... 
When it comes to science in general, and physics in particular, we don’t just want to know what’s going to happen under a given set of circumstances. We also want to know the answer to the key question of, “how much,” “how many,” or “in what amount,” when it comes to our answers. Being quantitative, and answering questions of amounts and timescales, not merely qualitative, is what separates a successful physical theory from one that must be discarded. In the expanding Universe, this is more important than ever, as questions of what we expect to form, when, and in what quantities, are essential for testing whether our theories of the Universe actually match up with our observed reality.
Clearly, we live in a Universe where stars came into existence long ago: back in the first few hundred million years of cosmic history. But is what we see compatible with what physics predicts when we take the expanding, accelerating Universe into account? That’s the big inquiry put forth by Patreon supporter Jeff Bonwick, who wants to know:
“Star formation makes qualitative sense: gas, ... 
Over the last few years, AI has dazzled us all. It can write our emails, optimize our workflows, and create alarmingly realistic videos. But is it intelligent? Can it actually understand things?
I’m not so sure. This week, I published an essay for my Long Game column in Big Think about this idea. To do that, I tell a story about a slime mold that might just be more “intelligent” than a human — even though it has no brain. (No, I haven’t lost my marbles yet; read it and you’ll understand.)
The basic premise is this: the world is pouring incomprehensible amounts of energy and capital into building systems that mimic a single, narrow form of human intelligence. But in the process, we may be ignoring a far older, and potentially wiser, form of intelligence. It’s also a type of intelligence that is in high demand as the world changes faster than ever.
Key quote: “In our rush to create artificial minds, we seem to have forgotten to study the real ones. Because once you start noticing the intelligence threaded through the ... 
12.5 to 12.6 billion years after the beginning of the Universe.
On Earth, biological organisms are getting more and more interesting as the years tick by. As the unbroken chain of life continues, the combined factors of inheritance, random mutations, and horizontal gene transfer serve to increase the total amount of genetic information found in the genomes of the most complex organisms. This results in them gaining more specialized features, and many new characteristics begin emerging.
Some organisms thrive together in colonies, with identical unicellular lifeforms binding to one another to ensure that the majority of them survive and thrive. Other organisms develop multicellularity: the ability for a single organism to produce multiple component parts — cells — that all remain bound together as part of the original, parent organism. And still other organisms become differentiated, where new subcomponents develop within an organism, conferring features and abilities onto it that it didn’t possess before. At this moment in time, the last of these effects leads to an entirely new kingdom of life on Earth: the fungi.
Evolving well before plants or animals ... 
This December, like every December, will include a single moment — often marked by a particular day, which is December 21st here in 2025 — where our planet’s axial tilt is perfectly aligned with the invisible line connecting the Earth to the Sun. In December, it’s the northern hemisphere’s pole that’s tilted away from the Sun, while the southern hemisphere’s pole is tipped toward it; in June, the opposite situation is true. When your pole is tipped toward the Sun, your hemisphere experiences the longest days and shortest nights; when the pole is tipped away, you get long nights and short days. This remains true, solstice after solstice and year after year, no matter how much time passes.
Although there are many factors at play that determine the behavior of each planet — its spin and orbital angular momenta, the eccentricity of its orbit, the effects of general relativity and the other planets — there’s only one that determines when the solstices are: axial tilt. As every planet revolves around the Sun, it rotates on its axis, and only the orientation of that axis matters. ... 
Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia but spent her formative teenage years in Nairobi, Kenya. For most of her youth, Islam was a distant, habitual backdrop. She observed the fasts, went to the mosque now and then, and perhaps idly carried a string of tasbih prayer beads. Then, in 1985, the Muslim Brotherhood swept through her community. Under the tutelage of a charismatic female teacher, Ali transformed. The casual tradition was replaced by a rigid, politicized fervor; she put on the heavy black hijab and learned to renounce Western culture.
Today, Ali is a Christian, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, and a conservative powerhouse. But the path between then and now reveals a fracture in modern identity politics. When Ali first arrived in the Netherlands in 1992, fleeing a forced marriage, she was lauded as a survivor — a Black, female, Muslim survivor. Here was someone who had been subjected to awful things — including genital mutilation — and her activism brought her recognition and celebration across the West.
But then, she started to say other things. She refused ... 
If asked to describe what sets a cognitively complex species like humans apart from others, many would list specific behaviors, such as telling stories, creating art, planning for the future, or navigating complex social structures. Given that, you might expect that neuroscientists attempting to understand the advanced brain would study it in action, as a person or animal moves through the world.
For much of its history, though, neuroscience has done the opposite.
“When I was a graduate student, neuroscience was almost entirely about isolating specific circuits to test how the brain controls your senses and movement,” says Dr. Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “You’d show an animal a stimulus, observe how it responded, and record which neurons fired.” This research defined foundational principles of the field, but according to Miller, when you study the brain at this level, “you’re really only looking at its edges.”
“We know surprisingly little about how the brain manages more complex cognitive behaviors, like making a decision or socializing,” says Felipe Parodi, a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, ...