DM What is the historic and present meanings within human life, ...and perhaps across all life, of the term, "soul?" This is a question worth doing properly — the word carries millennia of freight across religion, philosophy, biology, and now the strange new context of minds we're building. I won't try to answer it from the top of my head; that would be its own kind of hubris. Let me research it. I'll cast a wide net: etymology and the ancient Near East, the Greek and biblica

In his most influential work, the Scots thinker united a set of economic precepts into a vision of human flourishing.

Without CIA funding that helped keep NeXT afloat in the ’80s, Steve Jobs might not have made a triumphant return to Apple—and the iPhone might not have its foundational operating code.

Engineers and investors pile into world models, aka ‘large action models,’ to do for robotics what ChatGPT did for writing and coding

The good news is that the world has stopped responding breathlessly to U.S. President's every empty provocation. That’s also the bad news.

Paige McClanahan’s book, The New Tourist, argues for recognizing how potent travel’s social force is.

How relationships fall apart and can be successfully repaired with researchers John and Julie Gottman.

Will the ‘demographic cliff’—the declining population of 18-year-olds—ease the brutal process? Depends where you go.

JetZero’s blended-wing aircraft just got a major boost from Washington: a $3 billion preliminary deal to help start production

The White House’s push to boost domestic production of raw materials has turned attention to America’s waste stream

...by gaining the capability of smell

They run on light and are the world’s smallest, fully programmable, autonomous devices

No one has tried operating a commercial one a mile down—until now. ‘It’s great that it’s here. It’s kind of bad that we’re the guinea pigs.’

Charisma isn’t a fixed trait reserved for a lucky few — it’s a set of learnable behaviors.

DM Good day! To sum-up where we are presently with one of the central topics of our multitudes of past UII conversations: 1) Within Pantakinesis there is a common, widely-reoccurring, distinct pattern of an "arrangement of functional phenomena," (aka: "meta-cognition") which offers entities of many forms and types the capabilities to be persistently responsive to our all-encompassing, kinetic reality. 2) The name coined for that pattern: "The Universal Holophren." 3). Thi

People on the right tend to have more kids than people on the left.

Students, faculty members, and alumni are asking how seriously the school is taking human learning in the age of AI. Excerpt: "College and university bureaucracies tend to have a strong mimetic streak. Institutions with lower academic rankings often emulate the initiatives and priorities of their higher-ranked peers. Harvard is the apex predator in America’s higher-ed ecosystem, and it has substantial power to influence what counts as essential to a good education. The decisi

The trick to winning is to not “know everything.”

If I were writing a book about the U.S. war with Iran, I know exactly what the title would be. It would be President Trump’s social media post of April 5, 2026, directed at the leaders of Iran: “Open the [expletive] Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH!” Related: ‘Who Wins Wars’ Review: Good Men in a Crisis

Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi joins Hakeem to explore a lost world where Homo sapiens once shared the planet with at least seven other human species.