with Stephen Johnson • Thu 9 October, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

In October 2021, I wrote an article for Big Think about AI that ended with a summary of AI experts’ predictions about when humanity would create artificial general intelligence (AGI) — systems capable of understanding, learning, and performing almost any intellectual task that humans can. The surveys varied, but one put the average prediction around 2100.

That article is, to put it mildly, outdated. In the wake of rapid AI advancement, most experts now believe AGI will emerge within the next 15 years, with some claiming it’ll come this decade. “If you say you don’t think AGI is going to arrive until 2040, you are seen as like a hyper conservative, basically Luddite, in Silicon Valley,” as Andy Mills and Matt Boll put it on their new podcast, The Last Invention.

Now, some cold water: A recent report found that 95% of organizations that have integrated generative AI into their operations have seen “zero return.” This obviously doesn’t mean today’s models are useless, or that there aren’t worthwhile applications for AI outside of business. Still, it’s not easy for me to square this finding with grand predictions about AGI — a technology that would ostensibly emerge from scaling up the types of systems we have today.

Are businesses lagging behind? Will it be “agentic AI” that tips the scales? Are these reports failing to capture all the ways that businesses and individual employees are using these tools?

The answer may very well be “yes” to all three questions, as Ross Pomeroy explores this week.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG REVEAL

AI adoption rates look weak — but the data hides a bigger story

The biggest question in the financial world today is arguably, “Is AI a bubble that’s about to burst?” I won’t pretend to know. But one metric that might lend a tiny bit of insight into the question is AI adoption rates among U.S. companies. In June, data from the Census Bureau found that American companies had begun reducing their use of AI. That same month, McKinsey published a report stating that nearly “eight in ten companies report using gen AI—yet just as many report no significant bottom-line impact.” Is this just a bump on the road toward widespread adoption of AI and, theoretically, AGI in the workplace?

To find out, Ross Pomeroy spoke with one of the authors of the McKinsey report. Among other topics, they discuss the differences between today’s chatbots and “agentic AI,” which is in its early days, but could be what unlocks real transformation for businesses.

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Fast Stats

• 95% — The percentage of AI rollouts that fail.

• 4% — The share of companies that reach $1 million in revenue.

• 120 — The age people would rather die than live to be.

• 9 —The minutes it takes Jesse Eisenberg to teach you how to turn your anxiety into motivation.

THE BIG LEAP

The China factor in the great progression of the next 25 years

In just 35 years, China has gone from steam engines and rice paddies to the world’s largest high-speed rail network and clean-energy manufacturing base. In this op-ed, Peter Leyden warns that this “great progression” comes with a darker side: an entrenched surveillance state now poised to steer the future of AI. The U.S., he argues, should cooperate with China on climate tech while competing fiercely to ensure that the AI revolution unfolds within open, democratic systems.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The sci-fi hypothesis that explains why you click with certain people

By Jonny Thomson

The Sun is setting. We’ve had four beers and haven’t moved for two hours. It’s the first time I’ve ever spoken with Tony, and we get on like long-lost siblings.

“Tony,” I say, “let me stop you right there to compliment you on the size of your hippocampus.”

Tony laughs, just a touch awkwardly.

“Err, what?” he says.

“Your amygdala? Perfect. Great distribution, great connections, lovely blood flow.”

Another laugh — less mirth, more awkward.

“In fact, there’s little I can fault about either lobe. But then, I would say that… because I’ve got the same ones!”

Tony doesn’t laugh, but he does stand up, mumbling some excuse.

Tony and I might have got on, but it was a bad idea to point out why.

Read this week’s article to find out what on Earth I’m on about.

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THE BIG CONSIDERATION

The search for alien life must heed this lesson from Stephen King

In Stephen King’s The Stand, a plague wipes out nearly every human on Earth, sparing less than 1% of the global population. Imagine you survived — alone on a remote farm, wondering whether anyone’s left. You can’t know for sure. But here’s one reasonable assumption: If you find just one other survivor, there’s a very good chance there are many more out there. In this article, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explains how this line of thinking applies to our search for life in the cosmos.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 2 October, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Stripping context from familiar things makes them uncanny. The webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield has no clever tabby cat — just a sad Jon Arbuckle talking to himself. Seinfeld without the laugh track makes Jerry and the gang sound insane. And an empty, dimly lit hotel hallway — no doors ajar, no housekeepers, no voices through the walls — can feel less like a real place and more like a dream half-remembered.

That last one belongs to the “liminal space” aesthetic, which became popular online around 2019. The name refers to those in-between places we’re not meant to linger in — stairwells, airports, hallways — spaces that make sense only in relation to what comes before or after them. Stripped of context, these places can feel eerily dreamlike, familiar yet somehow wrong.

Liminal spaces aren’t just an internet phenomenon. The term comes from anthropology, describing the “ambiguous period when we leave an old identity behind but haven’t yet stepped into a new one,” writes neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

This week, she shows why life’s in-between spaces — the unsettling thresholds — are also where growth happens.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG IN-BETWEEN

Why liminal spaces are your brain’s secret laboratory

It’s no wonder life’s in-between stages feel so disorienting. Your brain is wired to crave certainty, so when you leave one role, relationship, or identity without yet stepping into the next, it sounds your internal alarm. But neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues this discomfort isn’t a flaw — it’s a feature. Liminal spaces, she writes, can act like a cognitive laboratory, heightening learning, creativity, and resilience by disrupting routine patterns. The key is learning how to flip that stress response into curiosity.

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Fast Stats

• 4,000 — The approximate number of NASA staffers set to have left the agency by January 2026.

• 5 — The great thinkers who abandoned their own ideas, as highlighted by philosopher Shai Tubali.

• 3 — The telltale signs your boss is high on “toxic positivity.”

• 1803 — The year the ancient idea of the atom was redefined into our modern understanding of matter’s basic building block.

THE BIG TOPIC

David Kipping on how the search for alien life is gaining credibility

“NASA used to effectively ban the word ‘SETI’ in proposals,” says astronomer David Kipping. “Now there are grants funding it.” In his interview with astronomer and 13.8 columnist Adam Frank, Kipping explains the recently shifting tides in the search for alien life, the Fermi paradox, and why an “extragalactic SETI” might someday provide unambiguous evidence for the existence of life across the cosmos.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

Would you rather be an absurdist or an existentialist? Here’s the difference between the two.

By Jonny Thomson

I am drawn to people I almost certainly wouldn’t get on with. I sometimes look at old photos of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus in their post-war France black-and-white chic and think, “Oh, to share a Kronenbourg with them.” How cool would it be to stay up late, dancing, talking politics, and debating the meaning of life?

But then, I have a crash-to-earth moment. I go to bed at 10 p.m. and get up with the sun. I generally hate talking politics and have two left feet on the dance floor. I don’t even like Kronenbourg. Worst of all, I think I would find the constant dissatisfaction of it all a bit dreary. Because both the absurdism of Camus and the existentialism of Sartre and de Beauvoir are heavily hued with a shadowy ennui.

To know what the hell that even means, read this week’s explainer into two of the most popular philosophies today.

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THE BIG IDEATION

Why your AI strategy needs guidance from an 82-year-old computer

In 1943, the U.S. Army built ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer. Weighing 30 tons and packing in 17,468 vacuum tubes, it could perform thousands of calculations per second. The military hoped that computers would someday be able to predict outcomes — of markets, wars, elections — by reducing the future to math. Those dreams were soon crushed, in part by fighter pilots, who, to the military’s surprise, fought well not because they followed textbook flying rules like a program, but because they creatively deviated from the rules when it gave them an edge. That paradox — machines that can out-calculate us but not out-create us — still defines AI today, argues professor Angus Fletcher.

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with Jonny Thomson • Thu 25 September, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Steve got married last Saturday. If you ask me, he should have been back at his desk by Monday morning, but he and his new wife have decided to go on some kind of “honeymoon” to “relax” and “enjoy ourselves.” Not in my day, friends, not in my day.

Of course, I joke. Steve is a good friend and a cracking editor, and so I’m upset that life and 3,500 miles of Atlantic Ocean meant I couldn’t be there to clink some bubbly on the big day. I will send him the usual wedding present in due course — a set of teaspoons, a toilet brush, or some mead, perhaps. In the meantime, I hope you will indulge me in offering the best present I can give: a newsletter takeover in his name.

This week is all about Steve.

As with most companies, there’s a phenomenon where the more you move up the ladder, the more you move away from your original job. At 65, looking at retirement, your job description is almost entirely different from what it was at 25. And so, long before Steve took the gilded seat of managing editor, he was a damn good writer as well.

So, today, we look at some of Steve’s finest moments as both a writer and editor at Big Think. We look at his most popular article, his personal favorite article, and the one I like the most.

Go Steve,
Jonny

THE BIG FLOW

Time is “elastic”: Why time passes faster atop a mountain than at sea level

When I first joined Big Think, I was given the keys to our article analytics. Finally, I could peek behind the curtain. I could constantly, obsessively track how my article was doing. I could see, in real time, how many people were reading my words. I could measure who was having a good week and what articles were soaring high. And in those early days, one article was soaring highest of all: Steve’s clock on a mountain.

I can see why. It’s a well-written explanation of the philosophy and physics of time, via the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. But it’s also anchored in a very-of-this-world phenomenon: Time not only feels different for everyone but actually is different for everyone.

“The river of time might be flowing forever forward, but it moves at different speeds, between people, and even within your own mind.” 🤌

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Fast Stats

• 1 – the number of species that weep; the evolutionary puzzle behind our tears.

• 1980s – the decade we discovered evidence of a Universe before the Big Bang.

• 5 – the number of books that demystify the brain, according to neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Barr.

• $1 trillion – the market value Amazon built with its innovation playbook.

WAKING UP: DEEPER TRANSFORMATION BEGINS HERE.

Go deeper, find more meaning

The world doesn’t need more noise. In fact, most folks reading this newsletter are interested in more quiet, more depth. That’s why I’m excited to share Waking Up, a transformative app created by neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris. It’s a place to explore the mind, challenge old narratives, and connect with timeless wisdom from some of the world’s leading teachers.

Try Free for 14 Days

THE BIG MEME

The story behind the internet’s most viral (and misunderstood) political meme

In the same way that parents secretly have a favorite child, writers also have their favorite articles. These are the ones born of weeks of reading after years of interest. You share them on social media and send them to your long-bored-of-this-crap friends.

This is one of Steve’s favorites. Memes are a window into internet culture, and a good meme has a kind of sticking power that even the best Big Think article does not. In this long-form piece, Steve oscillates between everyday relatability and fairly advanced statistics. He teaches us about heat maps, political division, and how memes — and statistics — can be misunderstood and misused.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

One of the most quoted lines in philosophy is completely misused and misunderstood

Steve didn’t edit my Mini Philosophy this week, but I can only imagine he rushed to read it, share it, and feature it in his wedding speech. Of course, the title is a little “clicky.” After all, there’s an entire book to be written about “commonly misunderstood quotes.” So, which one did I pick?

Well, it’s to do with Hegel and history. To be fair, Hegel is notoriously hard to interpret. He would write sentences that took up half a page, and you’d need an Olympic swimmer’s lungs to read his stuff aloud. And in this case, I feel as if Hegel made a rod for his own back. This is what he originally wrote:

“But what experience and history teach is this – that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”

This was interpreted by some people to mean that people foolishly, myopically refuse to learn the lessons of the past. If only we read more history, we’d make much better decisions. But that was not what Hegel meant at all. Read on to find out what he did mean.

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THE BIG LOOK INWARD

Mini-personalities: Why Carl Jung believed your “complexes” lead their own inner lives

I’m a philosopher, and I don’t think any psychologists (and especially neuroscientists) reading this would be desperately upset if I claimed Carl Jung as one of my own. Jung wrote beautifully about the human condition, but his works on the unconscious and personality feel more like philosophical arguments than any replicable scientific theory.

Steve’s piece on Jung explores the idea that we have a variety of personalities within us, each vying for control over the master ego. These versions of ourselves — these complexes — can “interfere with the conscious will and disturb its intentions … We can not only have complexes but also ‘complexes can have us.’”

Of course, we can debate, discuss, and disagree about Jung until the Swiss cows come home, but this piece is a wonderful invitation to think about personality more. “I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman famously wrote, and they’re all trying to take over, Jung would add.

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Jonny Thomson is the resident philosopher at Big Think and is the founder of the Mini Philosophy social network.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 18 September, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“I’m just doing landscaping until I land a real job,” I’d tell people during the summer after graduating from college. A dozen years later, I like my “real” job, but the joke’s sort of on me. The guy who ran that once-tiny landscaping company is now a multimillionaire. So much for elitist condescension.

What I do miss are the rewards of physical labor: seeing your work made real and ending the day pleasantly exhausted. You sleep soundly. Dinner and beer taste better. Leisure feels earned.

Desk jobs exhaust you too, but often differently. They leave you drained and scatterbrained, with nothing concrete to show for it. One reason is fragmented focus: In knowledge work, it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you’re fully absorbed in one task, while your focus is really split five ways. It’s taxing and unsatisfying.

How can you learn to direct your attention as deliberately as you direct your muscles to dig a ditch? That’s what behavioral scientist Danny Kenny explores this week in his interview with Dr. Emily Balcetis, whose work shows attention isn’t just passive — it’s a tool you can train.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG FLEX

Why your attention keeps slipping away (and how to get it back)

You don’t lose focus because you’re lazy. You lose it because attention is a system that scatters easily, especially if you’ve never trained it. Behavioral scientist Danny Kenny suggests picturing attention as a set of different “muscles” — visual focus, future connection, obstacle planning, and cognitive flexibility — that can be strengthened. Together, they make it far easier to stay focused and achieve your goals. “It’s mastering the invisible skill that makes everything else possible: intentional, directed attention,” he writes.

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Fast Stats

• 1860 — The year scientists began speculating about the possibility of “mirror life.”

• 1975 — When Kodak created the world’s first prototype of a digital camera.

• 10 — Incredible facts about the Big Bang, presented by astrophysicist Ethan Siegel.

• 6 — The core commitments of liberalism, according to legal scholar Cass Sunstein.

PRESENTED BY WAKING UP: GO DEEPER. BEGIN AGAIN.

Embrace the complexity within

I enjoyed this bit of wisdom from our friends at Waking Up: “In every moment, there’s a choice: to rush past or to look closer.” Their app provides a helpful structure of daily practices for folks who want to explore their minds and life’s meaning more deeply. It’s a yearlong journey that some have called life-changing, and they’re offering Big Think readers a full two-week trial.

Try Free for 14 Days

THE BIG GIMMICK

Neuroscience shows that speed reading is bullshit

I took an online reading speed test before writing this — breezed through it at 394 words per minute. Pretty good, right? No. A follow-up comprehension test showed I only understood about 50% of the content. Expensive classes might claim to multiply your reading speed, but the only thing you're likely to gain is “remarkable dexterity in page-turning,” as Donald Homa, a professor who specializes in memory and the visual perception of linguistic stimuli, once wrote.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

Ian McEwan: “Tourism is a wonderful spectacle of mass derangement.”

By Jonny Thomson

When I was 19 years old, I watched a movie called In Bruges and loved it. So, at the pub that weekend, I sat down with my mate Alex to share a plan:

“Shall we cycle to Bruges?”

“Bruges?” he said.

“Yeah, it’s this place in Belgium.”

Alex and I grew up near Dover, and we had the kind of relationship where cycling through Europe for a week wasn’t an odd suggestion. He said yes, and after a month’s training, we took our bikes on the ferry.

I saw and learned more about France and Belgium in that one week’s cycle tour than on a dozen visits since. Cycling is a gentle and slow-flowing way to see a place. You spend hours pedaling by fields and end up with a café au lait in some sleepy village where “Hello” is the most English you’ll get. You see places that are not in travel guides or on “Top Ten Destination” listicles, because why bother to pay for a holiday to see a dilapidated pub and an understocked, intermittent fish market?

In this week’s interview with the bestselling author Ian McEwan, we answer that question.

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THE BIG MISCONCEPTION

Biosignatures? Why organics on Mars don’t necessarily signal life

Last week, news broke that NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered a potential biosignature — in the form of organic compounds — on the surface of Mars. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy called it a “groundbreaking discovery.” What should we make of it? At the moment, not too much. Organic compounds can form from biological and nonbiological processes, meaning life didn’t need to exist on Mars for that compound to emerge. Here, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch explains what we can and can’t tell about Martian organics and what future Mars missions might do to improve the search for alien life.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 4 September, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Life would be a tedious hell if we never traded realism for utility. A realistic video game would make your character sleep seven hours, answer spam phone calls, and sit in rush-hour traffic. The heroes in action movies would roll on the ground and scream in agony because you’re not meant to jump off buildings like that. And no more sending emojis to convey emotions: only photos of your facial reaction in real time.

We usually want things — our art, our models — to be useful, not perfectly realistic. The 16th-century cartographer Gerardus Mercator had that in mind when he created the Mercator projection, which most world maps still use today. The Mercator projection made navigation far easier because it turned the curved paths of Earth’s surface into straight lines for sailors.

But the map’s utility comes with a tradeoff: It greatly distorts the relative size of landmasses, showing, for example, Greenland and Africa as the same size, even though Africa is 14 times as large. Now, the African Union is calling for an update to the world map, arguing that more realism might bring practical benefits to the continent.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG CONTINENT

Africa wants its true size on the world map

The African Union’s gripe isn’t so much that the Mercator projection makes the continent look smaller (landmasses near the Equator appear relatively undistorted). Rather, it’s that the Mercator projection makes other landmasses look relatively big, such as the U.S., which appears four times bigger than its actual size. The Correct the Map campaign, which the African Union recently joined, argues that this distortion is not just about cartography but also “power and perception.” I don’t know whether world maps really shape world powers, but this Strange Maps article is a fascinating reminder that even our most familiar models can be wildly off from reality.

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Fast Stats

• 1,000 light-years — The approximate distance to most of the brightest stars in our night sky.

• 430 million years — The first evidence of fire on Earth, when rising oxygen levels made combustion possible.

• 1936 — When computer scientist Alan Turing proved that no algorithm can always determine whether another algorithm will stop or run forever.

• 1 millimeter — The length of C. elegans, the tiny roundworm that became biology’s first fully sequenced genome and a foundational model organism

THE BIG SCARE

Why today’s publishers fear Goodreads more than government

In March, Bloom Books canceled the release of best-selling author Sophie Lark’s new romance novel, Sparrow and Vine. The decision came after some readers started an online campaign criticizing one of the book’s characters. The character was no Humbert Humbert or Patrick Bateman (not that Lolita or American Psycho should’ve been banned). She was instead “MAGA-coded” and said things that were casually racist, complained some readers. How did publishers come to bow to outrage campaigns? Why do readers think a fictional character’s dialogue necessarily represents the beliefs of the author? And what about the conservative right’s role in modern censorship? We spoke to Adam Szetela, author of That Book is Dangerous, to find out.

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• Freethink: From cryonics to aging: How AI is transforming human health

THE BIG DEBATE

Will AI create more jobs than it replaces?

Judging from recent surveys of executives at major companies, AI could displace hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide in the near future. But now consider the rise of “multimodal AI” — models can ingest images, videos, speech, text, and sensor data. As these relatively early-stage models advance, is it worth reconsidering just how severely AI could impact the global workforce? That’s one thing James Barrat covers in this preview of his 2025 book The Intelligence Explosion: When AI Beats Humans at Everything.

(Editor’s note: The summary above was updated on September 4, 2025, to clarify the focus of Barrat’s book.)

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 28 August, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Where do humans fit in the animal kingdom? The technical answer is that we’re great apes, members of the family Hominidae, along with chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans. But most of us don’t think of humans that way. We tend to view humanity as set apart, perched not merely atop the animal kingdom but outside of it. We have skyscrapers, Netflix, helicopters, croissants, professional wrestling, and pet dachshunds in sweaters. Animals do not.

But the history of our lineage shatters that illusion. For most of our past, we weren’t alone at the top of the animal kingdom: Our ancient ancestors walked the Earth with an estimated eight different hominin species, some of which left traces not only in the fossil record but also in our DNA.

It was only in 2010 that scientists discovered one of these species: the Denisovans. This week, Big Think contributor Dr. Jasna Hodžić speaks with the authors of The Secret History of Denisovans about the groundbreaking 2010 discovery — and why many people alive today possess genetic traces of that ancient species.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG DIG

How a dime-sized bone rewrote the story of human evolution

In 2010, scientists found a fingertip bone in a cave in Siberia. This alone wasn’t too surprising. More shocking were the DNA results, which showed that the bone once belonged to an entirely undiscovered species, now known as the Denisovans. It marked the first time a group of humans had been discovered through DNA alone. “These hunter-gatherer populations moved through the territory, they encountered other humans, they exchanged techniques of survival and also sometimes their genes,” paleoanthropologist Silvana Condemi told Big Think.

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Fast Stats

• 218 — Confirmed gravitational-wave events detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA as of 2025, more than doubling the 90 events from its previous run.

• 5 — The core principles of “dynamic work design”

• 3 — The “Naikan” questions to ask for a happier, healthier attitude toward life.

• 150 — The approximate width, in light-years, of the nebula known as the “Hand of God.”

PRESENTED BY WAKING UP: GO DEEPER. BEGIN AGAIN.

Is there more to meditation than we thought?

Here’s something I found compelling: The idea that meditation is for clearing your head of thoughts is a misconception. Our friend Sam Harris, the neuroscientist and philosopher behind Waking Up, says, “This isn’t about escaping the chaos. It’s about transforming your mind to meet it with clarity and purpose.” He’s made an effective app for that journey.

Try Free for 14 Days

THE BIG METROPOLIS

The strange cartography of Superman’s ever-shifting hometown

Superman’s hometown never stays put. Sometimes it’s New York, sometimes Chicago, sometimes Cleveland. But in the latest reboot, a Delaware license plate and state flag quietly plant Metropolis in the First State — adding a new twist to the strange cartography of the Man of Steel. “By definition, fictional places have a tenuous relationship to real geography: a general area is required, but a precise place is impossible,” writes Frank Jacobs.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The Nexus Method: How to make the most of what you learn

By Jonny Thomson

I would like to coin a word: lethomanthia. Lethomanthia is that feeling of forgetting something as you are learning it. I get lethomanthia a lot when I listen to a long and intensely educational podcast. I get it two pages into most nonfiction books. It’s that feeling of, “Wow, what a cool fact. I have no chance of remembering or repeating it.”

I wish that I weren’t such an accomplished lethomanthiac. It would be great if I could take everything I’ve heard and learned in the past year and put it to some concise use. Well, it turns out I’m in luck.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with one of the most famous and erudite polymaths writing today: Iain McGilchrist. And, over our conversation, McGilchrist offered a strategy that we can all learn from. It’s something I’ve come to call the Nexus Method.

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THE BIG BOOST

Ask Ethan: Can “zero-point energy” power the world?

The promise of “free energy” has been a scammer’s game all throughout history, writes astrophysicist Ethan Siegel in his latest “Ask Ethan” column. From cold fusion to perpetual motion, none have panned out. But there’s another contender that’s both real and mysterious: the quantum concept known as zero-point energy. Could it ever power our world — or is it just another mirage?

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Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 21 August, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Big Think’s editorial team spent this summer doing something we’ve never done before: making a magazine. Not a leaflet! Not even a pamphlet! We created a stunning, full-sized, display-it-on-your-coffee-table magazine. It’s packed with essays and interviews (and gorgeous artwork) about one of the hardest problems in science and philosophy: consciousness.

We interviewed and collaborated with some of the most interesting thinkers in the field. Inside, neuroscientist Anil Seth investigates the overlooked reason why “AI consciousness” isn’t coming anytime soon. The author Annaka Harris makes the case for why our common intuitions about consciousness are all wrong. Neuroscientist Erik Hoel reveals the tensions — and possibilities — at the heart of consciousness research. All that and much, much more.

Below is a peek at some of the stories in the digital version of our special issue on consciousness. If you want to read the full print edition, become a paid member on Substack, and we’ll mail you one.* (You’ll also receive all of our future print issues — more to come on those!)

Read on,
Stephen

*8/25/25 was the last day for submitting your address to receive the Consciousness Issue. If you become a member you will be added to the list for the next special issue.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE

Why AI gets stuck in infinite loops — but conscious minds don’t

I’ve always thought it unlikely that AI will ever become conscious. But before speaking with neuroscientist Anil Seth, I never considered that time may be the key reason why. Computation exists outside of time. A microsecond, a million years — it makes no difference to an AI. But living, conscious creatures must deal with time and entropy. “Unlike computers,” Seth writes, “we are beings in time — embodied, embedded, and entimed in our worlds.” Without this deep grounding, AI may never become conscious or develop the intelligence needed to break free from the “infinite loops” that trap machine minds.

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Fast Stats

• 2 — The main stages of sleep: non-REM, when consciousness fades, and REM, when it reemerges in dreams.

• 435 — The approximate age of the Universe in petaseconds.

• 29% — The share of participants in a study on the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT who reached a “peak” experience, described as “everything and nothing.”

• 5 — The most fascinating books on consciousness, as recommended by experts featured in our special issue.

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THE BIG CHALLENGE

6 questions about consciousness with Annaka Harris

“There’s something exciting about realizing that something you felt 99% sure about wasn’t quite right — or was entirely wrong,” says science writer Annaka Harris. “It paves the way for new questions and better understanding.” In this wide-ranging interview, Harris challenges the assumption that consciousness emerges from complexity, instead making the case for seeing it as a fundamental feature of reality.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

Think like a crow, choose like a crab: The animals inside our minds

By Jonny Thomson

When we talk about human consciousness, it’s easy to ignore the fact that it developed. Our minds were not dropped here like some celestial gift of Athena. Our consciousness didn’t light up overnight. The heavy, grey blancmange inside our skulls was crafted over billions of years of evolution. How we think, and even why we think, exists as a tiny dot on an unimaginably vast timeline — a timeline which stretches into the future as much as the past.

When we talk about “consciousness,” we often use it as shorthand for a variety of cognitive processes: imagination, deliberation, awareness, desire, and so on. Each of these has counterparts in the animal world. Each of these came from somewhere. And when we view our consciousness and intelligence from this perspective, we can start to learn more about what mindedness actually means.

This week, let my interviewee, Peter Godfrey-Smith, take us on a zoological journey inside different kinds of minds.

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Popular Columns

• Business: The best question a leader can ask: “What would my replacement do?”

• Starts With A Bang: Ask Ethan: Did life begin when the Universe was room temperature?

• Books: The last witnesses: Preserving the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• Freethink: What if humans mastered every aspect of nature?

THE BIG POSSIBILITY

Why the 21st century could bring a new “consciousness winter”

For much of the 20th century, “consciousness” was a forbidden word in the sciences. “It was simply thought of as too philosophical, too strange,” says neuroscientist Erik Hoel, who dubbed that period of frozen research a “consciousness winter.” He fears this century might see another. The most likely way that would happen, according to Hoel, is through the development of artificial general intelligence. This milestone wouldn’t necessarily make people think AI is conscious — just that it’s extremely intelligent. And that, Hoel thinks, might lead people to believe “consciousness doesn’t matter much.”

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 14 August, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“Come here, you big, bawkin’ sucker,” a farmer says as he wrangles a rooster in a coop. He’s straight out of central casting — tucked shirt, boots, big-buckle belt — and he says things like “There’s that two-timin’ rascal right there!” in the easy drawl of a man who’s been wrangling big, bawkin’ suckers since 1955. But this farmer was probably born in 2015.

From the video, it’s clear he picked up everything — his sayings, his skills, his way of being — from his father or grandfather. It’s funny, but also impressive: He seems like a genuinely competent and confident farmer, thanks to practice and a big dose of mimicry.

Mimicry comes naturally to kids. Toddlers learn language, motor skills, and social scripts largely by copying others. As you get older, explicit reasoning enters the picture, and you start to break things down in logical steps.

But what if we’re missing out by discounting mimicry? What if simply acting like someone who’s more skilled in a specific domain is a surprisingly quick and intuitive way to get better at something? That’s what Cate Hall — a writer, CEO, and former professional poker player — explores this week.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG TRICK

How to instantly be better at things

“Beginners are often neurotic, alternating between I better not fuck this up and I’m going to fuck this up,” writes Cate Hall. How to skip all that? Hall has a simple strategy: She pretends to be someone she knows who’s insanely competent. “Much of the time, it made me better at [a task] immediately,” she notes. This type of strategic mimicry isn’t about erasing yourself; it’s about letting a “deeper, more intuitive” learning system take over until you can run the show. And surprisingly, according to Hall, this method might continue to work even when you’ve become so skilled that there’s nobody left to mimic.

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Fast Stats

• 3 — The experts who reveal how psychedelics can expand the walls of perception in this Big Think video produced in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators.

• 6 — The “points of connection” that can repair trust across society.

• 36 billion — The mass, in Suns, of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the “cosmic horseshoe.”

• 4 — The requirements for high performance, according to John Amaechi, an organizational psychologist and former NBA player.

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THE BIG DEFINITION

What exactly is “life”? Astrobiologists still have more questions than answers

Defining life is harder than it sounds. Every proposed definition — from “self-sustaining chemical systems” to lists of traits like metabolism and reproduction — runs into exceptions, such as a newly discovered organism that seems to be something between a virus and a bacterium. The problem for some astrobiologists is that if we stick to Earthbound conceptions of life, we might fail to recognize unfamiliar lifeforms elsewhere in the Universe.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

3 ways to find and invite more wonder

By Jonny Thomson

You’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes at another “be mindful — appreciate the world!” article. It’s been several decades now, and yes, you’ve heard of Headspace. You went to a yoga class once. Your mate, Pete, even goes on retreats. So buzz off, Jonny, with your smart-skill listicle encouraging me to do more of the same.

And I would normally agree with you, if it weren’t for the bracing and original framing my interviewee, Maya C. Popa, gave to the idea of “wonder.” Wonder starts with a wound. It opens that part of you you often keep heavily armored and sealed up tight. You don’t have to be a Daoist or a psychoanalyst to enjoy this week’s article. Wonder requires vulnerability, and what breaches that wound will transform you.

Read this week’s Mini Philosophy to see how wonder is — and always has been — food for the soul.

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• Freethink: The forgotten war on the Walkman

THE BIG ENRICHMENT

What our shelves of unread books teach us about ourselves

The Williamsburg Trilogy. The Leopard. Behave. These are just a few of the unread books collecting dust on the bookshelf next to my desk. This article from Big Think Books editor Kevin Dickinson assures me that this ostensible waste of space and money is actually a good thing. It’s not because owning books makes you look smart, but because having a bunch of unread books is a constant and humbling reminder of how much you don’t know. And eventually, that reminder may nudge you to read more.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 7 August, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“Which do you prefer?” my fiancée asked me, pointing to wedding flowers in two vases, each one thoughtfully holding the flowers in a unique arrangement. Or so I was told. To my eye, they looked the same. In that moment of indecision, I became Buridan’s ass — the dim donkey in an old philosophical thought experiment stuck between two equidistant and identical piles of hay. With no reason to choose one over the other, the donkey starves.

Buridan’s ass is meant to satirically highlight the limits of rational determinism, the idea that we always choose based on the strongest reason. In real life, you don’t wither away in analysis paralysis; you just pick something. “The left one,” I said.

Thought experiments can refine and poke holes in your arguments and intuitions. But some go much further. As philosopher Shai Tubali writes this week, one particular kind of thought experiment can transform you by challenging not your logic but the way you choose (or don’t choose) to live life.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG REVELATION

The thought experiments that test your life, not your logic

Imagine scientists created a machine you could step inside and experience any kind of life you wanted: success, happiness, the absence of pain. While inside, it feels genuinely real, and you believe it’s real. You only realize it’s a simulation when the scientists “wake you up” every couple of years and ask if you want to continue. Would you? If “no,” what does that say about how you value things like struggle and authenticity? To Shai Tubali, this kind of thought experiment is a “Transformer” — a particular kind of scenario that can jolt you by forcing you to confront a question that’s as uncomfortable as it is revealing.

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Fast Stats

• 2012 — When scientists published the first comprehensive computational model of an entire living cell.

• 2030 — When NASA reportedly aims to start building a nuclear reactor on the Moon.

• 80 years — The length of America’s historical reinvention cycle, according to Peter Leyden.

• 10,000 years — The time until two supermassive black holes 4 billion light-years away from Earth will merge.

THE BIG SCENARIO

Mapped: How warm your city will be in the 2080s

What will your hometown feel like in 2080? A mapping tool from the University of Maryland uses "climate analog mapping” to project future climates in specific areas, finding (for comparison) a place on Earth today with the climate your city is projected to have decades from now. Under high-emission scenarios, New York feels like Arkansas, Madrid becomes southern Spain, and some cities — like Riyadh — have no future analog at all. Their projected climate doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth. Yet.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

What makes a meme take off? The 3 rules of virality

By Jonny Thomson

Mini Philosophy has quite a large following on social media. It’s hard to word that without sounding like an arrogant arse, but it’s better than calling myself an influencer or, worse, a “thought leader.” You can call other people a thought leader, but you can’t call yourself one.

One of the things I’ve come to learn since developing this audience is how much skill there is to creating “content.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s not neurosurgery or pole vaulting, but there’s certainly more nous and talent to it than you’d think. “Anyone can just do a silly dance,” you might say. “It’s easy to be famous on TikTok.” And yet, not everyone can; not everyone does. Finding a topic, crafting a “hook,” balancing the flow, filming it without fluffing, and choosing when and where to post all involve skill.

This week we look at how “memes” go viral. We lift up the hood and see why things are popular – even if knowing why doesn’t make it any easier to do.

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• Freethink: World’s first nuclear electricity influencer envisions a “Rad Future”

THE BIG PERSPECTIVE

Not just the Western Front: Ring of Fire rediscovers WWI’s global story

We usually learn about the First World War through the eyes of generals and emperors, or battle lines on maps. But the new book Ring of Fire reimagines the war as a global rupture told through the eyes of ordinary people — conscripts, colonized subjects, factory workers. Historians Alexandra Churchill and Nicolai Eberholst map the conflict’s overlooked theaters, from West Africa to East Asia, and trace how its shockwaves reshaped empires, rewrote borders, and altered the course of everyday lives around the world.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 31 July, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

I spent last week hiking in Glacier National Park, and I saw animals I’d never seen in the wild: moose, black bears, and an adolescent grizzly who, sitting just 20 feet from the trail with no mama bear in sight, made me turn on a dime and think, “Enough with the Mother Nature for today.” I backtracked toward the trailhead. With my head buzzing from the exercise and delusional thoughts of how I’d beat a 600-pound grizzly in hand-to-claw combat, I looked up to the sky and spotted another animal: a huge turtle, otherwise known as an oddly shaped cloud.

Delirious amateur hikers aren’t the only ones who see creatures in clouds. It’s a common phenomenon called pareidolia, which is our tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in random stimuli. This is adaptive in the evolutionary sense: You’re better off regularly mistaking, say, a pile of leaves for a grizzly bear, because sooner or later, it will be the real thing.

But this perceptual reflex doesn’t stop at leaves and clouds — it may also shape how we interpret society itself. This week, social psychologist Adam Waytz argues that pareidolia helps explain why we’re so drawn to sweeping social narratives like the “crisis of democracy” or the “loneliness epidemic,” even when the underlying data for these trends is shaky.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG CRISIS

Most social trends aren’t what they seem

Our minds struggle with nonlinear thinking. Case in point: Theoretically, how many times would you need to fold a piece of paper such that its thickness stretched to the Moon? Just 42. It’s a classic example of how wrong our intuitions about exponential growth — a type of nonlinear change — can be. We expect trends to change in smooth and predictable lines. But reality, especially in the social world, is rarely that simple. In this piece, Adam Waytz breaks down some recent high-profile social trends and makes the case for why we may be seeing animals in the clouds rather than real patterns in the data.

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Fast Stats

• -5 — The correct answer to a simple math question that large language models often get wrong.

• 6 — The books that changed former NBA player John Amaechi’s life.

• 3 — The “universal motives” that can illuminate your blindspots, according to Harvard organizational psychologist David McClelland.

• 5 — The big unanswered questions about the origin of life.

THE BIG QUESTION

Ask Ethan: Did our Universe really arise from nothing?

There’s a handful of deep-sounding questions that people enjoy debating at a certain point in life, usually around college age, while high at 3 a.m. What if God is just everything? What if this is all a simulation? I gave up on all these. But one sticks with me: Where did this all come from? It’s a question whose answer is so fundamentally strange, no matter what it turns out to be. Here, astrophysicist Ethan Siegel explores how it’s possible that the Universe came from “nothing” (at least, if you accept a particular definition of “nothing”).

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The public-private myth: Why religion can’t be kept behind closed doors

By Jonny Thomson

The annoying truth for any philosopher or psychologist is that when it comes to our beliefs, motivation, and behavior, there are no simple answers. There is hardly ever one thing we can point to and say, “Aha! That’s why they are that way.” Every part of our mental life is only ever half-seen in a murky epistemological haze.

Let’s pick one example: Why you’ve carried on reading this far in this newsletter. The easy and neat answer would be to say, “Oh, Steve’s introductory hook was pure gold.” But in reality, it’s to do with how you slept last night, what you ate this morning, what time of day it is, what other things you’ve got to do, who else is in the room right now, how loud the traffic is outside, and so on.

What goes on inside our heads is complicated, and our thoughts, feelings, and needs spray out into the world like a dropped can of Coke. And of course, our religious beliefs are no different.

Read this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with Simon Critchley about mysticism to find out what I mean.

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• Freethink: Second opinions in the age of ChatGPT

THE BIG CHANGE

How and why your memories shift over time, explained by neuroscience

Memory feels like truth. In reality, it’s more like storytelling. Neuroscientists André Fenton and Lisa Genova explain how each act of remembering reshapes your past. Memory isn’t fixed. Rather, it’s a living process, tied to perception, identity, and the stories we choose to believe.

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with Mike Hodgkinson • Thu 24 July, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Around this time of year, many of us embrace the summer by hiking into the great outdoors for a mind-and-body reset. Oh yes, we say to ourselves, a long-overdue hit of hawk-song and ozone and stargazing will apply a restorative salve to our hunched and gadget-bound digital work-lives. Unless, of course, it all goes south and Mother Nature bares her fangs, leaving us pining for concrete and gibbering that immortal lament from Withnail and I: “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake.”

In all likelihood, the untamed wild will be the least of our problems. As we stare up at the ceiling of our tent, ensconced in our wilderness of choice, the thing that’s most likely to keep us awake is not going to be the furtive moose who side-eyed us earlier that morning, or our paranoia that prairie dogs have figured out how to steal our tent stakes and repurpose them as daggers. No, the thing that’s going to perturb us the most is our inability to scroll, because our phones have no signal. Even when confronted with all the planetary beauty that Earth allows, our one big annual shot at the sublime will be undone by the engineered highs that are straining to erupt from our hijacked neural tunnels, like cocaine moles on a fix-quest.

This week, neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains exactly how social media and the dopamine system have conspired to chain us to a mindless “crash-loop” hamster wheel. More than that, she reveals how we can break the habit without resorting to such desperate measures as hurling our phones into the nearest glacial lake.

Onward,
Mike

(Filling in for Stephen, who’s gone camping in a remote National Park)

THE BIG HIT

How to escape the “dopamine crash loop” and rewire your curiosity

Dopamine, explains Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is a double-edged sword. Released in the network of regions that comprise the brain’s reward system, it makes us feel good — for example — when we’re on the verge of a great discovery. Eureka! On the other hand, when hijacked by the “variable reward schedules” imposed on us by social media, dopamine creates a compulsion to measure out our lives in mindless thumb-scrolls. The good news, according to Le Cunff, is that we can consciously redirect our reward system towards curiosity and meaningful knowledge. So the choice is yours: keep that thumb twitching until you hate yourself for cooing at the drowsy kitten you already knew would sleep-tumble off that cheap sofa … or retrain your compulsive brain to learn useful new things.

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Fast Stats

• 2012 – The year an experiment was conducted that proved the universe is not the same forward and backward in time.

• 2 – The number of case studies that show hiring seasoned industry veterans can set up your startup for a greater chance of success.

• 1864 – The year John Wilkes Booth had a mysterious meeting that changed him from beloved actor to Confederate conspirator.

• 3 – The steps it takes to train for the CIA, according to espionage agent Andrew Bustamante.

THE BIG PLOT

Is this acre in England really American territory?

There are many fascinating details attached to the acre of “American soil” located a stone’s throw from Windsor Castle in leafiest, royal-most England. Presented to the U.S. in 1965 by Queen Elizabeth II, in memory of JFK, the plot bears a scarlet oak with foliage that turns deep red every November, the month of the assassination. The memorial block, made of Portland stone inscribed with a portion of text from JFK’s inaugural address, weighs seven tons. In 1215 AD, an arrow’s flight away, King John sealed the Magna Carta, prompting a chain of political and philosophical thought that led through the centuries to the U.S. Constitution. Incredible details all, but only one question needs asking: If by some bizarre accident of wayward midwifery you were born on this very acre, would you automatically become an American citizen? Frank Jacobs has the answer.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The Tree of Kink: What science teaches us about fetish clusters

By Jonny Thomson

Let’s say you’re at a dinner party, and there are ten people around the table. Each is sexually active and randomly selected from the general public. Given that, around six or seven of the guests will have fantasies about BDSM (bondage, domination, submission, etc.). Four will have had at least one BDSM experience. Roughly two will have a foot fetish, and one person will have an underwear fetish.

Tuck in, it’s time for the starter. Let’s talk about the weather.

People have sex, people have fetishes, and we often don’t talk about either. We especially don’t treat it as a scientifically rigorous and important subject in itself. Which is why we look at it in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with the sex worker, Aella. Read on to find out more.

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• Freethink: Gen Z: We must resist the temptation to cheat on everything

THE BIG GAME

Gaming cancer: How video games and citizen science could help cure disease

What’s the greatest game of all time? Some would quickly say chess, with its medieval aesthetic and vast archive of cunning strategies. Or perhaps the original Space Invaders, a masterpiece of relentless simplicity and laser-cannon satisfaction. How about Go, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, GTA, DOTA, or WoW … every contender driven by our evolutionary desire to solve tricky problems. But as professor Jeff Yoshimi speculates, the greatest of all games may yet to be played: a game that cures cancer. “There are thousands of problems relating to cancer, and there are thousands of approaches to game design and genres of game, so the potential is vast,” Yoshimi, who explores various attempts to gamify drug discovery in his book, Gaming Cancer, writes. “Even without a background in biology, you might have skills in art or design, or just be really good at games. That’s enough to contribute.”

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 17 July, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Reasoning your way into toxic nihilism is easy. It could look like this: There’s probably no afterlife, God, or grand purpose to the Universe. The best we can hope for is to be remembered. But history only remembers a handful of “great” people. I’m no Caesar or Einstein. So why try when I could just run out the clock, distracting myself with creature comforts? After all, the most “successful” people I know are often the most unhappy. Life is suffering with no clear goals, so who cares?

None of this is necessarily wrong. But it is obnoxiously sad and cowardly. Most people instinctively reject this blackhole-bummer of a worldview, even if they’ve never read a lick of philosophy. We choose to believe things matter.

So why does meaning often elude us, changing shape or vanishing altogether at different points in life? As Danny Kenny explores this week in his interview with behavioral scientist Arthur Brooks, the answer might lie in how people mistakenly think meaning is a puzzle to be solved.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG RETHINK

The meaning of your life isn’t a puzzle to solve

After his soccer career ended, behavioral scientist Danny Kenny hit a crisis of meaning. “I thought if I could just find the perfect job, the perfect routine, girlfriend, apartment—if I could arrange all the pieces correctly—meaning would automatically emerge.” It didn’t. What eventually helped wasn’t an answer but a shift in mindset: Meaning isn’t a final destination, but a way of traveling. “There’s a strange irony in the search for meaning: the harder you chase it, the more elusive it becomes. But learn to wrestle with the question instead of demanding an answer, and meaning stops running.”

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Fast Stats

• 6 — The number of “superpowers” that generalists bring to leadership, according to Mansoor Soomro’s The Generalist Advantage.

• 40 quintillion — The estimated number of black holes within the observable Universe.

• 70% — The share of terrestrial species wiped out when an asteroid struck Earth some 65 million years ago.

• 1714 — The year Britain passed the Longitude Act, an early gamified innovation challenge.

THE BIG DISCOVERY

Evolution isn’t a straight line: Modern humans come from 2 ancient lineages

For decades, the prevailing theory of human evolution held that Homo sapiens descended from a single ancestral population in Africa. But new research suggests a more complex story. About 1.5 million years ago, our lineage split in two. These separate branches of humanity evolved apart for over a million years, then rejoined around 300,000 years ago. That reunion — not a straight line of progress — is what shaped the modern human genome.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The 4 psychological markers of ideological extremism

By Jonny Thomson

People tend to define “extremism” by its content — far-right or far-left politics and religious fundamentalism, mostly. It’s thought that people’s beliefs fall somewhere on a spectrum, and if you push them a bit further along, they suddenly fall under the “extremist” umbrella.

But in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, Leor Zmigrod argues that extremism should be measured not by the contents of a belief, but by how that belief is held. In other words, extremism is defined by how it filters your interactions, how inflexible it is, or how it demands a degree of violence — against others or yourself.

When it’s framed like this, it becomes apparent that most of us are at risk of being “extreme” about something. But what factors incline a person more or less to extremism? Well, that’s what we talked about in this week’s article.

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THE BIG EXPERIMENT

Science meets sweat: How experimental archaeology brings history to life

Science writer Sam Kean recently found himself on an Aztec ball court, wearing a leather loincloth that crushed his groin to “neutron-star density” as he tried to hit a 15-pound rubber ball with his hips. Why? Experimental archaeology. In Dinner with King Tut, Kean takes a hands-on approach to the past by recreating the practices of people long gone. He tanned animal hides. He made a canteen from an ostrich egg. He even fired a trebuchet and medieval cannon. “It helps us get in touch with our deeper humanity and get over some of the discontents of modern times,” Kean said.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 10 July, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

There are more niche jobs now than in ancient Rome. You could get paid to eat 18 Crunchwrap Supremes on a livestream. You could be “Corpse No. 4” in a zombie movie. You could, if the band got back together, be the trombonist for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.

But the Romans had an especially niche job that’s now extinct. Whenever a general returned to the capital after winning a war, Rome would celebrate him with a spectacular public parade. These so-called “triumphs” were the ultimate ego boost in a culture that championed honor, pride, and military achievement.

So for balance, a slave was tasked with standing behind the victorious general amid the chaotic festivities and periodically whispering into his ear, “memento mori.” Remember, you will die.

This week, behavioral scientist Danny Kenny argues that this reminder — that we will certainly die one day — is a surprisingly practical way to cut through bullshit and reveal what truly matters in life.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG SKILL

Why memento mori is the ultimate life hack

Close your eyes. Fast-forward to age 90. It’s a Tuesday, and you’re sitting on a porch. What’s the best version of this moment? For Danny Kenny, it’s simple: being surrounded by loved ones and being healthy enough to think clearly and move around. Not on the list? “The size of my bank account. The prestige of my job title … None of it makes the cut when you’re staring down the barrel of your own mortality.”

Consulting your future self is just one practical way to rebalance your present priorities that Kenny explores in this piece about memento mori, which for him is the ultimate “BS detector.”

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Fast Stats

• 5 — The stories that teach you philosophy (better than some philosophy books).

• 36 — The age at which Vincent Van Gogh moved into an asylum.

• 2034 — The year when a unique mission to Uranus and Neptune could launch.

• $4.4 trillion — The predicted growth potential that long-term AI investment could add to the global economy.

THE BIG COLLABORATION

What Earth’s undefeatable organisms reveal about survival

Astrobiologist Betül Kaçar is resurrecting ancient microbial genes to understand how life once adapted to an Earth that was completely unlike our own. No oxygen. Toxic oceans. Massive climate swings. Through it all, microbes survived, adapted, and invented the chemistry that still powers life today. By reconstructing those early innovations, Kaçar’s lab is uncovering tools that could help us rethink how to adapt to a changing planet.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The noble lie: Why countries that lie together, stay together

By Jonny Thomson

Epistemic paternalism is the idea that we should police what people know. It’s when we control curricula, ban books, and expose people only to certain ideas. If any of you are screaming “Fascism!” at your screen, let me tell you that almost all governments in the world employ some degree of epistemic paternalism. For example, we don’t teach children how to hack computers — or we at least make it difficult for them to learn on their own. We also remove content that might prejudice a verdict in a court of law.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy article, we explore the concept of the “noble lie,” a narrative we invent to unite people and, hopefully, help society work a bit better. Historically, noble lies have been outright supremacist — “We’re the best, the barbarians are the worst.” These days it’s more subtle — “This ideology is the best, that one is the worst.”

The question is: How far should we want to — and how far should we allow — these deceptive bindings to be challenged? Should we seek to erode the glue that binds us together? Should we call out the “noble” lie?

Read on to find out more.

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THE BIG KEY

Why your microbiome may matter more than DNA for your lifelong health

“Am I human, or am I bacteria?” That’s the question that stuck with Big Think contributor Jasna Hodžić while reading The Microbiome Master Key. In the book, Brett and Jessica Finlay make the case that the trillions of microbes we carry aren’t just along for the ride. They help shape our digestion, immune system, skin, and maybe even how we think. “The best thing about the microbiome,” says Brett Finlay, “is that you can change it.”

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with Jonny Thomson • Thu 3 July, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

Steve has been kidnapped. We’ve locked him in a basement at Big Think HQ without windows or distractions and told him he needs to edit. This summer, Big Think will release its first-ever print edition, focusing on the topic of consciousness. It’s serious business and requires serious editing — so no natural light or toilet breaks for Steve, I’m afraid.

So, you’re left with me — the often unserious and poor-at-editing host of Mini Philosophy, Jonny Thomson. I’m here to present you with a rundown of our most popular articles from 2025 because, hold on to your sleigh reins, we're just over halfway through the year, closer to Christmas than we are from it. This week, we’re looking back at what management types like to call “H1.”

And what a disparate collection of intellectual wonder there is. We’ve got suck-less black holes with Ethan Siegel, the psychology of singleness with Ross Pomeroy, a long, untested train journey with Frank Jacobs, and a portal to fairyland with Big Think’s most handsome writer.

Big Thinking caps on, everyone*. It’s time for a magical tour of Big Think's big H1.

Go well,
Jonny

*Not you, Steve. Back to work.

THE BIG ONE

The Big 5 personality traits linked to lifelong singlehood

Arthur Schopenhauer had a theory: People never really change. We are born with certain core characteristics or personality types, and everything that happens over 80 or so years is mostly window dressing. The job of life is to simply find a life that suits who we are.

Being a tenured philosopher, he didn’t feel the need to empirically verify this theory, but there is something to it, though only so far. As Ross Pomeroy points out, modern psychology says that while “core aspects of an individual’s personality tend to be stable, significant changes can occur over decades.”

Schopenhauer lived and died single. But, I’m sorry, Arthur, not everyone is preordained to be so. Yes, some personality traits incline you to singledom, but not only is it possible to buck the trend, but we can also grow in who we are. Read on to find out more.

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THE BIG FANTASY

Why Tolkien thought “sub-creation” was the secret to great fantasy and science fiction

When I was in my early twenties, I would lie quite a lot. People would often ask, “What are you reading at the moment?” and I’d pull out something nicely pretentious. “Well, I’m trying Camus in the original French. No, it’s L'Étranger, actually. A soft J at the end.”

In reality, safely away from judging eyes, I’d sit down in a chair to open a world of dragons, dwarves, and wizards. I’d love invented words: “The dark elves of the Hollow Reeve spent millennia mastering glyphweaving.” It turns out that Tolkien felt the same strange need to justify his works. A lot of his non-fiction work was spent writing about the importance of myth, fairy tales, and, of course, epic fantasy.

In this article, I explore some of his best points.

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THE BIG ADVENTURE

The world’s longest train journey is epic — but nobody’s ever taken it

Every Christmas, lying under the tree was a rectangular, heavy gift. My brother and I would look at each other knowingly as we opened the traditional “Guinness Book of Records.” Most years, the content was the same, just with different pictures and layouts. But the best part of flicking through was trying to find a record that either my brother or I could do. Most straws in a mouth? No, Mom would disapprove. Longest moustache? No, I’ve barely hit puberty. Longest time hiccupping? Possible, but unpleasant.

Well, if you’re reading this, brother, we’ve found it. We’ve found the record to break. Because, out there somewhere, is the longest train journey in the world — and it’s never been taken. Yes, we might need to resolve a few geopolitical conflicts, but surely that’s easier than stuffing 500 straws in your mouth.

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• Freethink: Has AI made “learn to code” obsolete?

THE BIG SUCK

Black hole myth busted: they don’t suck anything in

I try. I really try to get my head around a lot of physics. I’m starting from a base position of a childhood diet of Star Trek, recently enhanced through audiobooks and conversations with friends who are smarter than me. And, of course, I read Ethan Siegel’s articles.

Ethan somehow manages to combine all of my physics media into one. He is one of the smartest friends I have, he has a great podcast, and he often manages to frame obscenely difficult concepts in Star Trek-level language for me to understand. But I do wish he wouldn’t relentlessly undo all my (albeit wrong) understandings of physics. Here he is at it again, telling me that black holes don’t “suck” at all.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 26 June, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

After three hours of recently playing electric guitar too loudly with an old schoolmate, a weird fact hit me: This was the first time I’d been with a friend in a month. It’s not that I wasn’t in touch. I saw their faces on video calls, heard their voices, and read their texts. But old-fashioned, three-dimensional hanging out? A rarity these days.

The strange part wasn’t that 30 days had passed. It’s that I didn’t notice. Screen friendships may seem like a close-enough substitute, but they flatten the fresh-paint scent of your friend’s new basement, his 4-year-old daughter throwing a drumstick at the TV, the feedback whining from an overworked amp, and the sight of a grizzled German shepherd somehow napping through it all.

Technology has obviously transformed our relationships. What’s less obvious is how it might be eroding our instinct to seek them out at all. This week, journalist unpacks what he calls “the Anti-Social Century” — a time when we’re more isolated and increasingly content to be.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG EPIDEMIC

The great friendship collapse: Inside The Anti-Social Century

with

Today, the average American spends 20% less time socializing in person than just two decades ago, and a record amount of time alone. In this Big Think Interview, Thompson traces how technology, convenience, and culture have quietly reshaped our relationships, arguing that the rise of generative AI will likely make things worse. The good news? The antidote is simple and free.

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Fast Stats

• 8 — The steps to revitalize any conversation, according to Emily Kasriel.

• 4 — The ways leaders can boost their “CQ” (cultural intelligence).

• 3 — The CIA’s official levels of secrets (confidential, secret, and top secret), based on the damage they’d cause if exposed.

• 17 — The number of years wild crows can remember a human face.

THE BIG GIFT

“Otroverts” and why nonconformists often see what others can’t

Some people can’t — or won’t — follow the crowd. In The Gift of Not Belonging, psychiatrist Rami Kaminski calls these people “otroverts” — independent thinkers who stand apart from groups, resist conformity, and sometimes see what others can’t. “Otroverts cannot be convinced of the validity of an idea sheerly through the number of people who hold it,” writes Kaminski. “It is the idea itself that matters.”

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

3 ways to have more meaningful conversations

By Jonny Thomson

Steve, editor extraordinaire and Smarter Faster compère, is in the UK this week. We met in London on Tuesday night, pulled in a few Big Think friends, and talked for six hours. It’s not always easy to talk for six hours, but this wasn’t hard at all.

Conversations have their own energy. Sometimes, as on Tuesday, they just flow and pull you along in their current. At other times, a conversation can feel like some cruel affliction. These are the conversations that are so tediously inert that you’d pay good money for the chance to watch paint dry instead.

A lot of it has to do with the physiology of the conversational participants. Are they awake, refreshed, happy, positive, calm, or somewhere between tipsy and bladdered? But it also has to do with personality types and experience. On Tuesday, almost everyone was, in some ways, Socratically trained. They knew how to ask questions and how to steer a conversation.

If you want to find out more about what that means, read this week’s Mini Philosophy article.

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THE BIG SEARCH

Ceres: The asteroid belt’s forgotten ocean world

We tend to think of the asteroid belt as space rubble. But Ceres, the belt’s largest object, is a dwarf planet: round, geologically complex, and shaped by ancient water. Scientists believe it once harbored a muddy, mineral-rich ocean, which could make it a promising target in the search for ancient life.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 19 June, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

You’re dealt two cards at the start of a Texas Hold ’em game. You get a 7-2 offsuit and fold. Easy decision — it’s the worst starting hand in the game. An hour later, you’re up big and facing just one opponent. They go all in. You hold a pair of kings. You scan the community cards on the table and realize the odds are in your favor. You call, and you lose.

Was it a bad decision? Not necessarily, according to Annie Duke, a poker champion turned decision consultant. Based on the available information, you made the right call. It just didn’t go your way.

People tend to judge decisions based on the results instead of the reasoning behind them. To Duke, that’s no surprise: Most schools don’t teach how to think about probabilities, risk, or uncertainty. This week, Duke makes the case for why decision-making is the overlooked science that everyone should learn. Doing so might help you choose better in life’s biggest decisions — like knowing when to fold ‘em.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG DECISION

When to quit: A simple framework for life’s toughest decisions

Years ago, behavioral scientist Danny Kenny faced a seemingly impossible decision: Should he quit a toxic and draining PhD program or stick it out? He couldn’t envision either future clearly. But then he stumbled upon Duke’s 2018 book, Thinking in Bets, which introduced him to a seemingly counterintuitive concept. “Instead of trying to predict whether staying or leaving would work out better, I needed to focus on making the best possible decision with the information I had, knowing I couldn’t control the outcome,” Kenny writes.

In this interview, Kenny revisits that decision with Duke, who offers a simple and practical framework for when to call it quits.

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Fast Stats

• 21% — The share of Americans who reported in 2018 that they believe Bigfoot is real.

• 11 — The number of years it takes for the Sun’s magnetic poles to flip.

• 15 — The number of languages in which Big Think+ Learner and Discussion Guides are now available.

• $2.34 trillion — The rough amount of physical U.S. currency in circulation worldwide.

THE BIG TOOL

AI is already in the classroom. It’s time colleges caught up.

A 2024 survey found that 86% of college students use AI in their studies. Like it or hate it, AI is in the classroom and will likely stay there. What should schools do? In this op-ed, Columbia University student Gal Winter argues that it’s “time for schools to stop pretending this technology can be ‘defeated’ and instead begin building an education system that works with AI, not against it.”

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The “repugnant conclusion” that an Oxford philosopher couldn’t escape

By Jonny Thomson

The best villains in cinematic history are those you can empathise with. They are complicated, with backstories and motivations that cannot be dismissed entirely out of hand. That’s how I feel about Thanos in the Marvel movies. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of his methods: too much maiming and murdering for my liking. But when you learn about his beliefs and why he believes them, you can kind of see what’s happening here.

As I say in this week’s Mini Philosophy article, Thanos did not study under Oxford professor Derek Parfit. If he did, he’d undoubtedly have a few objections to make. Parfit and Thanos start from the same place but reach wildly different conclusions. Read more to find out what I mean.

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THE BIG ENCROACHMENT

Why China is eating its tiny neighbor, Bhutan

China has built villages inside Bhutan’s internationally recognized borders — not to take over the tiny Himalayan kingdom but to gain a strategic advantage over India. In this Strange Maps piece, Frank Jacobs unpacks the slow-motion land grab playing out along a disputed 300-mile border. At stake is the Doklam Plateau, a patch of high ground that overlooks the narrow corridor connecting India’s northeast to the rest of the country. Bhutan is caught in the middle, unable to push back against China or give Beijing what it wants without risking war with India.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 12 June, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“And that’s why we won’t be extending your internship into a full-time position,” the manager of my first writing job told me. I’d been expecting this conversation: There were two interns and one full-time opening. I wasn’t sure who’d get the job, but I assumed rejection would sting.

It felt incredible. “Sure, yeah, whatever you think — appreciate the time here,” I said. I walked out of that hushed D.C. office building like Peter Gibbons in Office Space, ready to trade in the chinos and button-up for a fishing rod and a Hawaiian shirt.

I realized then that I hated that job. I’d only liked what it erased: the anxiety of not knowing when I’d land a “real” job after spending my first post-college summer working manual labor. Getting that “real” job felt better than uncertainty, but only for a while.

Uncertainty is psychologically uncomfortable: Sooner or later, you want clarity. This week, neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains how we tend to react to uncertainty — and why blindly rushing toward clarity is often a mistake.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG CHASE

The hidden cost of chasing clarity

“From a neuroscience perspective, uncertainty is not just uncomfortable — it can feel threatening,” writes neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff. In this essay, Le Cunff recounts the uncertainty she felt after leaving her job at Google. She’d planned on taking time to explore and reflect. But she soon found herself rushing into a new project — one with clear goals and timelines but little alignment with what she valued. “It taught me something important: Clarity driven by anxiety rarely lasts.”

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Fast Stats

• $27,575 — The money director Kevin Smith spent to make Clerks, whose debut had virtually no audience.

• 1,500 — The number of technological disruptions RethinkX analyzed to understand what makes them go from fringe to mainstream.

• 780,000 — The number of galaxies revealed in the James Webb Space Telescope’s largest science operation.

• 95% — The percentage of news media that is “wrong or irrelevant,” according to veteran economist Steve Hanke.

THE BIG MYTH

A Mesozoic myth: Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth like we think

We tend to picture prehistoric life as dinosaurs ruling the Earth while mammals hid in the shadows, waiting for their moment. But in The Shortest History of the Dinosaurs, science writer Riley Black shows that this story falls apart under the weight of new fossil evidence. Early mammals weren’t passive survivors — they were thriving, diversifying, and sometimes even eating dinosaurs. “Dinosaurs did not rule anything,” Black writes.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The dancing monk: Why mature people don’t chase total control

By Jonny Thomson

I was at an L&D conference this week representing BT+. Once I got past the impostor syndrome (“I’m actually a philosopher!”) and tuned my ear to the in-house lexicon (“What obstacles are there to your transformation journey?”), I began to enjoy the experience. L&D is, in many ways, philosophy in action. It’s millennia-old wisdom filtered through the jazzy animations of someone who knows how to give a good keynote presentation.

An example: One of the first-day speakers was giving a talk about her transformation journey when she said, “So, I sat down and thought ‘I can’t change that, but I can change these things.’” And a smooth animated circle came up to highlight what she was talking about..

I reached over to my mate Hannah at BT+ and said, “That’s the dichotomy of control! That’s Stoicism!” Hannah smiled blankly and went back to listening.

The dichotomy of control is all about accepting what you can’t control and changing what you can. And the tricky bit is working out what falls into either category. That’s what this week’s Mini Philosophy article is all about.

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THE BIG UNFOLDING

What happens the day after humanity creates AGI?

Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg has spent decades writing and developing technology, including building augmented-reality systems for the U.S. Air Force. He knows a lot of people in the industry. So it came as a surprise that virtually nobody in his circle has given much thought to the likely consequences of artificial general intelligence, at least the ones he thinks will be most significant. For Rosenberg, those consequences center not on the job market or AI-powered disinformation, but on our very “identity as thinking beings.”

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 5 June, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“Who believes 9/11 was an inside job?” an evangelical pastor asks his parishioners, requesting a show of hands pointed toward the heavens. “Maybe this is what God wanted you to find out — that 9/11 is a fraud and that our country actually has the satanic world government located in New York; it’s called the United Nations.”

A video of that sermon has 787,000 views on X. “It’s definitely my kind of church,” wrote one user. “I’m whatever denomination this is,” wrote another.

But others asked the obvious: What does any of this have to do with Jesus? The answer — nothing — represents a problem in American Protestantism. There’s too much politics from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, even in churches far less extreme.

That’s a key claim in Jonathan Rauch’s latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. I recently spoke with Rauch, a journalist and atheist, about why he thinks Christianity is in crisis, and why that crisis spells trouble for American democracy.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG BARGAIN

The price of Christianity’s “broken bargain” with democracy

Why would an atheist like Rauch care about the state of American Christianity? Two decades ago, he didn’t. He once wrote an essay celebrating the decline of religion in American life, quipping that he was an “apatheist.” Today, he calls that essay “the dumbest thing” he’s ever written. Although still an atheist, Rauch argues that Christianity has been a stabilizing force in American democracy for centuries, one secular America ignores at its own peril. Check out my interview with him featured in our Big Think Books newsletter.

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Fast Stats

• 0 — The anomalies left in the muon’s “magnetic moment” after scientists finally solved the g-2 puzzle in 2025.

• 3 — The ways to respond to grief based on the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus.

• 4 — The days we should be working each week, according to economist Juliet Schor’s AI-era proposal.

• 10 — The quotes about science’s value to society, as highlighted in Ethan Siegel’s recent article.

THE BIG SEARCH

The hunt for alien technosignatures is getting a high-tech upgrade

Thousands of reports. Zero conclusive evidence. That’s the gist of humanity’s investigation into the existence of alien life so far. But scientists aren’t souring on the search. This summer, the search for so-called technosignatures, or signs of alien tech, will get a major boost in the form of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will image the southern sky using the largest digital camera ever built, capable of spotting small objects much farther out in our Solar System than ever before.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

The “SSS” framework: How to change the world with what you have

By Jonny Thomson

When do you call it a day? How much must you do before you say, “Yep, that’s me done”? For most people, the clock defines the finish line. Dong. There goes 5 o’clock — I’m off home, thanks everyone! At other times, the job itself sets limitations. A presentation needs making, an email needs sending, a block needs cleaning, and so on.

But what about those never-ending activities that permeate a life? When it comes to things like “eating well” or “talking with friends,” there are no hard-and-fast rules. “Right, Rosa, it’s been fun, but our 20 minutes are up. See you tomorrow.”

The question I explore in this week’s Mini Philosophy interview with historian Rutger Bregman is: How much is enough when it comes to charity, change, and helping others? Everyone has a limit, but how close does anyone actually get to it?

Learn more in this week’s article below.

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THE BIG STORY

5 scientists on finding meaning in our Universe’s 13.8-billion-year story

We could learn nearly everything about the cosmos — the number of galaxies, the nature of dark matter, the secrets of the Universe’s first moments — and be left awestruck yet unmoored. Mind-bending facts don’t necessarily pave a path toward meaning, wisdom, or how to live life. (As philosopher David Hume put it, you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is.”) Still, beyond the cold, hard data, could we find deep meaning in the story of our Universe? That’s the question Shai Tubali explores with five cosmologists and physicists in this wide-ranging essay.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 29 May, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

“Perhaps this isn’t a scientific question, but…” an interviewer once said to the astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol. As the Director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, Cabrol’s life work is scientific questions. But she replied: “You don’t have to be scientific all the time.”

That stuck with me. Not because it’s profound — obviously, nobody’s always scientific (imagine the small talk) — but because she has no problem taking off her science hat when conversations step outside the reach of modern science, as often happens in debates about the true nature of reality or consciousness.

The alternative? Keep the science hat on and risk stepping off the map.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, Jonny Thomson speaks with author and parapsychology researcher Rupert Sheldrake about his controversial view that we need “a larger, more inclusive model of reality” that remains empirical without ignoring what our current paradigm can’t explain. The question, as Jonny writes, is whether expanding the map helps us see more clearly or just blurs the lines between science and speculation.

Read on,
Stephen

MINI PHILOSOPHY

Fringe or frontier: Is our current scientific paradigm still the best fit?

By Jonny Thomson

The revolution is the easy bit. Any old brute with a big enough sledgehammer can knock down a building. The hard bit, the ingenious bit, is building something better in its place. So, too, with scientific paradigms. It’s one thing to say, “Our existing scientific framework is inadequate and incomplete.” It’s another thing to say what should replace it.

In this week’s Mini Philosophy article, I spoke with Rupert Sheldrake about the need for a new paradigm. Sheldrake firmly believes that the existing paradigm leaves out too many things, not least “consciousness” — something quite dear to most of us, I would suspect. But Sheldrake is not an anti-scientific mystic. He wants to replace our current paradigm with something that’s just as empirically guided. All science should follow and accommodate the evidence. But is it really possible to build up a new edifice when you need something more than bricks to do so?

Read on to find out more.

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Fast Stats

• 1 — The number of sentences that constitute a biography of Jesus Christ, if limited to what historians can say confidently.

• 4 — Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s rules for a good philosophical debate.

• 17 & 29 — The prime numbers used in the rhythm and chord sequence of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” keeping the music out of sync for 493 chords and creating a sense of timelessness.

• 1930 — The year the neutrino was proposed; now, scientists have finally narrowed down its mass with unprecedented precision.

THE BIG FLOW

What Leonardo’s obsession with water teaches us about longevity

Leonardo da Vinci’s resumé would put most of us to shame. He painted history’s most famous portrait. He designed helicopters centuries before they flew. He dissected cadavers to study the body from the inside out. But lately, Eric Markowitz has been thinking about one of the polymath’s lesser-known interests: fluid dynamics. Da Vinci was obsessed with how fluids move in nature; how they shape and sustain it over time. And in that obsession, Markowitz sees a clue to why Leonardo’s work has lasted over time.

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THE BIG GAP

Ancient China was less equal than the Roman Empire. Here’s why.

The Roman Empire and Han China existed at the same time, ran similar bureaucratic machines, and even knew of each other (though they never formally met). But a new study reveals a striking difference: Han China, despite its Confucian ideals and progressive taxes, was far more unequal than Rome. In this Strange Maps piece, Frank Jacobs maps the wealth gaps — and what they might reveal about why one empire endured and the other fell apart.

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THE BIG CONTROVERSY

Peter Singer: The enormous moral cost of censoring dangerous ideas

Peter Singer is one of the world’s most influential philosophers, famous for his work in applied ethics, particularly animal welfare and effective altruism. But my favorite Singer production came in 2021 when he helped publish the first issue of The Journal of Controversial Ideas, which is exactly what it sounds like. (We’ve covered one of the journal’s articles; it’s too disgusting to explain here.) Big Think recently spoke with Singer about offensive ideas — and why he thinks silencing them helps nobody.

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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 22 May, 2025

Hey Big Thinkers,

In the late 17th century, the English scientist Robert Plot inspected a shockingly huge chunk of bone, too big to have come from a human or animal. So, where did it come from? Scientists didn’t know about dinosaurs at the time, so Plot couldn’t have known that he was looking at the femur of a Megalosaurus. His best guess? The thighbone of an ancient human giant.

Scientists would discover dinosaurs a century later. It was a twofold revelation: We learned not only that huge reptilian monsters once ruled Earth, but also that it was possible for entire species to vanish forever. Before the 1800s, extinction wasn’t a concept.

This week, historian Thomas Moynihan tells the story of how we learned about species extinction — and how fantasies of resurrecting lost species began as soon as we learned they could disappear.

Read on,
Stephen

THE BIG COMEBACK

The strange history of de-extinction began long before the science

In April, the U.S.-based company Colossal Bioscience announced the “world’s first de-extincted animal” — the dire wolf, which vanished some 13,000 years ago. The real story isn’t quite Jurassic Park, but it’s still pretty cool: Colossal essentially used gene editing to produce grey wolf pups with genetic traits resembling the extinct dire wolf. Who knows whether “de-extinction” will ever be possible, but one thing is for sure: Dreams of resurrecting lost species didn’t start in Silicon Valley or Hollywood, as Thomas Moynihan explains in this piece.

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Fast Stats

• 4 — The conditions of “intelligent failure” as outlined by Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School.

• 10 — The number of space pictures whose appearance will deceive you, according to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel.

• 4 — The key challenges (or opportunities) that brands face over the next five years, according to marketing guru David Aaker.

• 3 — The questions you should ask when considering any theory of consciousness.

THE BIG SHIFT

“Mystery humbles you”: Scott Derrickson on why skepticism and faith aren’t enemies

I’m no film snob, but I wouldn’t describe Marvel movies as spiritually transformational. After Scott Derrickson directed 2016’s Doctor Strange, however, he’d come to describe the experience as a “spiritual pivot” for him. “I dove into Eastern philosophy — Buddhism, Hinduism — and came out of it more of a mystic than anything else,” he tells Big Think 13.8 columnist and physicist Adam Frank. In their conversation, the physicist and the filmmaker talk about faith and skepticism, exploring how the two aren’t natural enemies but rather complementary languages for making sense of a mysterious world.

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MINI PHILOSOPHY

“Cosmic realism”: The secret ingredient to great books

By Jonny Thomson

What is love?

Love is not an abstract noun, ungraspable and infinite. It’s something you get at 7:13 a.m. on a forgettable midweek day. Love is only watching the next episode when they’re home. It’s toothbrushes standing side by side. Love is the swelling of confidence when they walk into the room, and the telepathic look across a dinner-party table. It’s deciphering their handwriting for someone else, and it’s saying “Oh, they won’t like that” to a stranger. It’s a thousand compromises over a thousand days, and when coming in second feels like winning.

Love is not defined, but a mosaic of tiny, everyday actions that form a tableau. It is seen from God’s eye: a collage known only to the cosmos.

This idea — where huge, indigestible concepts are approached through small, mundane actions — is known as cosmic realism, and it’s what the Booker Prize-winning author Paul Lynch told me he thinks makes the greatest books in history so great.

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THE BIG HUB

Why Substack will be the intellectual engine of the 21st century

If we’re heading into a new civilization-scale transformation, where will the world’s best ideas come from? In this essay, tech expert Peter Leyden suggests they won’t come from institutions, politicians, or billionaires — but from the thinkers already gathering on Substack, where a new Royal Society may quietly be taking shape. Check out his full essay series on (you guessed it) Substack.

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Stephen Johnson is the managing editor at Big Think.

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