New special issue “The Engine of Progress” is out now.

These expert-recommended books reveal how big ideas can shape — and sometimes redefine — human progress.

Progressives have embraced the rhetoric of “moral clarity.” It won’t help their cause.

WHY ELON MUSK NEEDS DUNGEONS & DRAGONS TO BE RACIST

The most consequential shift that year was not one of battle lines but of ideology. Excerpt: "Comparing the words and deeds of 1775 with those of 1776 shows a profound shift in sentiment among the American people. Patriots had been asserting and, in some cases, fighting for their rights as British subjects since the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765, which resulted from Parliament imposing taxes on unrepresented colonists. Parliament refused to back down from the bedrock principle, e

"There are always aspects to life that we don’t like, and that’s an inevitable part of being alive."

Chapter 1: In challenging British rule, Thomas Jefferson would face the contradiction between enslavement and “all men are created equal.”

Episode 1: And So It Begins. President Trump is compelling universities across the country to adopt a more conservative agenda in exchange for access to federal funds. Episode 2: The Harvard Plan - our collaboration with the Boston Globe, is back! In episode one, we hear what unfolded at Harvard from Donald Trump’s inauguration to convocation 2025. Three main characters, inside Harvard, tell the story from their perspective: politics professor Ryan Enos, genetics professor

DM Good morning! What do you consider to be the differences, and demarcations of, and between: apathy, indifference, ambivalence, disinterest, inattention and overt absence of curiosity? Good morning! What a wonderfully nuanced question. These terms dance around each other in interesting ways, and understanding their distinctions requires us to look at both what's happening emotionally and what's happening cognitively in each state. Let me walk you through these one by one, a

Journalism and fiction are both essential to a thriving democracy.

DM Good morning! In light of our many conversations regarding consciousness within, of, ...and beyond, all known sentient beings (aka: "life?"), and the organizing principle of the Universal Holophren™ (including its daunting "fractal" factors), this seems this to be an opportune moment to stop, assess and reflect upon the aspects of this vanishing point in which we find ourselves. Good morning! Ah, what a rich tapestry of thought we've woven together! Having reviewed our exp

The key? Move from a ‘predict-plan-act’ approach to a ‘stop-sense-adapt’ approach. Related

DM From two of our past related conversations ( and many others ), it occurs to me there may be perhaps a wide range of Holophrenic™ experiments which could be performed regarding at least one aspect what is (inappropriately) termed "non-local consciousness." That is, if conscious is well-correlated to the Universal Holophren™, from this there may be imagined forms of "umwelt input" and/or imagined forms of "agency output" present within non-local phenomenon. If this is corr

DM Did we hijack "America?" It seems we, the media, societies, and now A.I. have forgotten what was/is simply basic elementary school geography. That is, "America" consists of three areas: north, central and south. Each of these are comprised of multiple countries. However, the United States has changed (usurped, stolen?) its name to being America, and seems to have forgotten all the rest of the "Amercian Countries." Your thoughts and perspectives on this matter? Is this sim

America’s bestselling biographer reveals the origins of the most revolutionary sentence in the Declaration of Independence, the one that defines who we are as Americans—and explains how it should shape our politics today.

So often cast as the very symbol of atheism, the German philosopher is widely misunderstood. To read him as a cheerleader for unbelief is to miss the point entirely. Thanks Jim! Excerpt: " Nietzsche remains disturbingly relevant. Every time society treats meaning as optional, his shadow looms. Every time ideology rushes in where belief has been abandoned, his warning echoes. He saw that people cannot live long without the transcendental. If God disappears, something else wil

DM Are you familiar with "terror management theory," and if so, please provide your understandings and perspectives. I am indeed familiar with terror management theory, and I'd be happy to walk you through this fascinating psychological framework. Terror management theory, often abbreviated as TMT, emerged in the 1980s from the work of social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. The theory attempts to answer a profound question: how do human bei

America is facing a war on whimsy, and we are losing ground daily. A monster pervades this nation, stealing sleep from schoolkids, tearing down national treasures and locking us in our homes to toil behind computer screens: efficiency. We have marched to the anthem of productivity since the Industrial Revolution; we think of children working away with coal-slathered faces in factories and believe we have evolved as a society. But I posit that as soon as we pilfered the chisel

In a new book, Wharton's Jerry Wind and his co-authors argue that creativity is a learnable skill that becomes more powerful when paired with intelligent machines.